“We like to think that tyrants are different from the rest of us. That they are somehow inhuman. They are not.”

— David Gemmell , book The Swords of Night and Day

Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 10
Context: It is the curse of absolute power, Olek. There is no one to admonish you, no laws save those you make. We like to believe there is something special, even alien, about evil. We like to think that tyrants are different from the rest of us. That they are somehow inhuman. They are not. They are merely unchained, unfettered; free to do as they please.

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David Gemmell 195

British author of heroic fantasy 1948–2006

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Quintana of Charyn

“The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

Lila (1991)

“We differ widely from each other; do we not, as circumstances change around us, moulding us like slaves to their will — do we not differ yet more from ourselves?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

“The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds- social, economic, even ethnic- yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but did that mean that we had to think alike?”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 62
2000s, (2008)

“Is al-Sisi a party (to a ceasefire)? Sisi is a tyrant himself. He is not different from the others.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as reported by Agence France Presse on 18 July 2014 http://aa.com.tr/en/politics/erdogan-did-not-attend-un-dinner-to-avoid-egypts-sisi/40683
About

“In this tree of humanity, with all of our branches and diversity, we all go back to the same root. We’re all one family -- we're all one tribe. And yet so much of the suffering in our world stems from our failure to remember that -- to not recognize ourselves in each other. We think because somebody’s skin is slightly different, or their hair is slightly different, or their religious faith is differently expressed, or they speak a different language that it justifies somehow us treating them with less dignity. And that becomes the source of so many of our problems. And we think somehow that we make ourselves better by putting other people down. And that becomes the source of so many of our problems. When we begin to see other as somehow less than ourselves -- when we succumb to these artificial divisions of faith or sect or tribe or ethnicity -- then even the most awful abuses are justified in the minds of those who are thinking in those ways. And in the end, abusers lose their own humanity, as well.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)

“I have Asperger's syndrome and that means I'm sometimes a bit different from the norm. And - given the right circumstances - being different is a superpower. It makes you think differently. And especially in such a big crisis like this one we need to think outside the box. We need to think outside our current system, that we need people that think outside the box and who aren't like everyone else.”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

Greta Thunberg Explains Why Her Asperger's Is A 'Superpower' That Helps Her Activism https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/greta-thunberg-arpergers-activism_n_5d77e5cee4b064513575d260, HuffPost (10 September 2019)
2019