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this broken offspring of broken politics
“Now there’s some top-quality despair.
If I could not hope for peace, I could hope for smaller things,
bloodstained partial-paradise,
Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning.”
I will not risk sacrificing the future for the present. I will not give up a thousand future worlds to save this one.”
A new world is betrayal.
But can I be called good if I merely desire their happiness, but do not attempt to achieve it?
Nothing comes from nothing, not wisdom and not grief.
“You will be alone if you make us all your enemies.”
As Machiavelli observed, Rome showed, tyrant after tyrant, how those reared in palatine luxury, expecting to be master of the world, basely abused the godlike authority that fell to them unearned, while those promoted through merit—Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—made judicious use of the Imperium of which they considered themselves, not owners, but custodians. It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours.
The creation of a European Emperor was the only real change, proof that, when burned, human habit still trusts the legends of Augustus and Charlemagne over democracy.
One does not, when all paths seem steep, plunge lightly into thorny wilds.
I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity, viewing health, happiness, rest, and play as means, not ends, and that, while Utopia provides my needs, I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars.
my days do not belong to me, but to the future.
exile you to the dark exhaustion of forever?”
to Oregon, whose mountains offer Nature’s therapy to those minds Science can’t yet heal,
They didn’t let us forget the war, but they did let us feel ready for it.
Then Mycroft caught their breath enough to murmur “Oxygen,” and I sobbed too. Fireworks devour oxygen. The chemicals may have been Martian, but precious breaths they fed on were Mars oxygen, crafted over two centuries of agonizing patience by the incremental growth of plants and microorganisms, fed on nutrients extracted from the bodies of Utopian dead. And now they burned it, undid that work, those lives, for this, these Games, to remind wrathful Earth of their solidarity, and salve the public’s bitterness about the Harbinger Peacebonding Strike. Their bid to not be Troy.
it was my task to doubt.
Our technology was ready to brave Antarctica, but we were not.
but a game of hide-and-seek without a fixed amount of time you have to wait before pursuit becomes a game of tag.
We were all ready to react, not to act.
