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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
“To hear, one must be silent.”
what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it,
To light a candle is to cast a shadow
you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?
Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do.”
the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do .
“He who throws away his power is filled sometimes with a far greater power,”
“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance.
