... there is in such a population, of itself, no help at all towards reconstruction
of the wreck of your Niagara plunge; of themselves they, with whatever cry
of 'liberty' in their mouths, are inexorably marked as slaves; and not even
the immortal gods could make them free,—except by making them anew .

Thomas Carlyle, "Shooting Niagara: And After?"

... there was something, something that his men had been unable to grasp,
... that neither prison nor torture, nor a state of siege could put a stop to;
something that was moving in the subsoil ... with unpredictable manifes-
tations.... It was as if the atmosphere had been changed by the addition
of some impalpable pollen or hidden ferment.

Alejo Carpentier, Reasons of State

People have always aspired to an idyll ..., a realm of harmony where the
world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men,
where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock ...,
where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who
refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught
and squashed between the fingers like an insect.... From the start there
were people who realized they lacked the proper temperament for the idyll.
... But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who
wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of going
abroad, they went behind bars.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting