"Reverence For Life"
Ruling through "toolmen" - human collaborators who are either computer controlled or who have been raised to accept the Shing as benign human lords, the only truth that the Shing seem to accept is the law of preservation of life. They appear as pathological liars, though Falk, the Alterran leading character of City of Illusions, comes to conclude that "the essence of their lying was a profound, irredemiable lack of understanding" of the peoples that they have conquered. Shing character, culture, architecture and even clothing is ambiguous and illusory.
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Famous quotes containing the words reverence for, reverence and/or life:
“I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart’s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“Towards him they bend
With awful reverence prone; and as a God
Extoll him equal to the highest in Heav’n:
Nor fail’d they to express how much they prais’d,
That for the general safety he despis’d
His own: for neither do the Spirits damn’d
Loose all thir vertue; lest bad men should boast
Thir specious deeds on earth, which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnisht o’er with zeal.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)