...the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to
unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to
maintain and strengthen.
-- Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf (novel, 1927).
It is not good when men overstrain reason and seek to organize with
the help of reason things which are still not accessible at all to
reason. Then there arise such ideals as those of the Americans or the
Bolsheviks; both are extraordinarily rational and yet both do terrible
violence and rob one of life, because they simplify it so very
naively.
-- Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf (novel, 1927).
Thomas Wayne, translator. p.141.