IP

“What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

“As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.”

“For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.”

“Laughter is by definition healthy.”

“It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.”

“The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.”

" Era uma vez - «há muito tempo», talvez «numa galáxia que ficava longe, muito longe» - uma civilização avançada, livre, tolerante, individualista, num planeta cujas calotes polares começaram a crescer. Não havia civilização que fosse capaz de deter o avanço do gelo. Os cidadãos do Estado ideal construíram uma poderosa muralha, que resistiria aos glaciares por algum tempo, sim, mas não para sempre. Chegou o momento em que o gelo, indiferente, implacável, atravessou as suas linhas e os esmagou. O seu último acto foi o de escolherem um grupo de homens e mulheres que atravessaram a superfície do gelo até aos últimos confins do planeta, para transmitirem a notícia da morte da sua civilização, e preservarem, nos modestos termos que pudessem, o sentido daquilo que fora a sua civilização, tornando-se seus representantes.

Ao longo da sua difícil viagem pela calote de gelo, o grupo aprendeu que, para sobreviver, tinha de mudar. Os seus diferentes individualismos tinham de fundir-se numa colectividade, e foi essa entidade colectiva - a Representação - que acabou por conseguir chegar aos últimos confins do planeta. Todavia, o que representava agora não era o que quisera de início representar. A viagem cria-nos. Transformamo-nos nas fronteiras que atravessamos.

(Salman Rushdie em Pisar o risco, sobre o romance de ficção científica de Doris Lessing, The making of the representative for Planet 8 )