“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road… You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
— Ursula K. Leguin, ​The Left Hand of Darkness

“Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Everyone knows me but no one can tell me. No one knows me even though everyone has heard my name. Everyone talking together makes something that seems like me but is not me. Everyone doing things in the world makes me. I am blood in the streets, the catastrophe you can never forget. I am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything. You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz