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People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.
Being feared is nothing. Being despised, even, can be lived with. But being laughed at—that’s fatal.
Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”
“You don’t need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life.
“It’s all but impossible to change people’s minds and hearts, Raych. It’s enough to try and perhaps eliminate the worst of the injustices.”
“However, though the request is reasonable and the citizenry is better off paying taxes as their price for maintaining a stable and efficient government, they are nevertheless reluctant to do so. In order to overcome this reluctance, governments must make it appear that they are not taking too many credits, and that they are considering each citizen’s rights and benefits. In other words, they must lower the percentage taken out of low incomes; they must allow deductions of various kinds to be made before the tax is assessed, and so on.
There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before.
