You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
—Octave Mirbeau
An end to change (Shafak)
Undergoing undesired changes that bring an end to the past can prompt a desire to bring an end to change per se in the future. Those with less to conserve end up all the more conservative.
Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities
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