[T]he underlying process I want to emphasize is this: there is a relentless cycle in which one conceives of the enemy a certain way, and then that conception begins to work back on us. The enemy as human-machine black box becomes us as human-machine black box. The enemy city targeted, bombed, dispersed becomes our city dispersed in preventive anticipation.

Peter Galison, in Sina Najafi, “The Ontology of the Enemy: An Interview with Peter Galison”

[W]hen we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them and ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels. In the same way we diminsh the worth of the institutions of society—law, journalism, education, and religion as well, when we forget respect and love for the imagined other, the man or woman or child we will never know, who will take the good from these institutions that we invest in them, or who will be harmed or disheartened because our institutions are warped by meagerness and cynicism.

Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community”, in When I Was a Child I Read Books