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“And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?”
“There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”

— Edgar Pangborn A Mirror for Observers (1954)

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More quotes by Edgar Pangborn

I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.

Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972)

I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

All Edgar Pangborn quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edgar Pangborn (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.