from Joseph Brodsky’s essay ‘The Condition We Call Exile’

… Since there is not much on which to rest our hopes for a better world, and since everything else seems to fail one way or another, we must somehow maintain that literature is the only form of moral insurance that a society has; that it is the permanent antidote to the dog-eat-dog principle; that it provides the best argument against any sort of bulldozer-type mass solution – if only because human diversity is literature’s lock and stock, as well as its raison d’être. We must talk because we must insist that literature is the greatest – surely greater than any creed – teacher of human subtlety, and that by interfering with literature’s natural existence and with people’s ability to learn literature’s lessons, a society reduces its own potential, slows down the pace of its evolution, ultimately, perhaps, puts its own fabric in peril. If this means we must talk to ourselves, so much the better: not for ourselves but perhaps for literature.

The White Tiger

What’s that you say, Mr. Jiabao? Do I hear you call me a cold-blooded monster?

There is a story I think I heard at a train station, sir, or maybe I read it on the torn page that had been used to wrap an ear of roasted corn I bought at the market—I can’t remember. It was a story of the Buddha. One day a cunning Brahmin, trying to trick the Buddha, asked him, “Master, do you consider yourself a man or a god?”

The Buddha smiled and said, “Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.”

I’ll give you the same answer to your question, Mr. Jiabao. You ask, “Are you a man or a demon?” Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel; translated by James W. Ellington [1785] (1993)