When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. – Lois McMaster Bujold

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. – Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. – Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man