Time of the Octopus

Preface

Preface

...May they be damned, these interests of civilization; and may civilization itself be damned if its preservation demands the stripping of skin from living people.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Benjamin Franklin

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.

Lao Tzu

The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

George Orwell