Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.

forever doing her best with the shoddy tools the universe gave her.

Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.

If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net—what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?

Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy—the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too—conquers all, in the end.