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Joseph Carens, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, argues that this social order—of relatively closed borders, where citizenship is an inherited privilege—has much in common with the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Being born a citizen of a wealthy, industrially developed country like Canada is analogous to being a child of the nobility: regardless of your exact rank or wealth, you are likely to have a life of greater prospects and agency than if you were a peasant. And like feudalism, this seems like an entirely reasonable way of ordering society to most of those who are to the manor born. Carens points out, however, that there is nothing that you can say to the serf in the field that could justify why they have a different lot in life from the nobles.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra

THE world was to be destroyed. Doctor Death had decreed it. Oddly enough, a majority of the people believed his statement. In some quarters, the news was received with rejoicing. Men were to be reborn on a common level; everyone was to start afresh. The wealthy would be brought down to a plane with the common men.

Doctor Death, over night, became a national hero with the working classes. Doctor Death clubs were formed with a Death’s head as their emblem. Soap box orators sang his praises on street corners. The police broke up mass meetings of demonstrators in every large city.

It was a certainty that from these clubs and demonstrations Doctor Death was recruiting a small army. Already there was a feeling of tension in the air. It was whispered that mankind was to be destroyed with the exception of a certain few and that from this selected group a new race was to be started.

But Death himself, the head and brains of this impending disaster, was still a thing apart. Once he was in their power, the police knew that they could handle his followers. To this end the men of the Secret Service and Detective Bureau combed the city. Thousands of sympathizers were arrested, only to be freed for lack of evidence.

— Doctor Death Vs. The Secret Twelve, Volume 1 by Will Murray, Harold Ward

He turned sadly away. The hell-pack swept over the body of the murdered man. They pawed at him, pulling his hands, his arms, his body, satiating themselves in the vitality that still remained before rigor mortis set in. The library reeked with a hellish charnel scent...

— Doctor Death Vs. The Secret Twelve, Volume 1 by Will Murray, Harold Ward

In the beginning, he understood, humans had built a lot of robot soldiers. Technically there had to be some earlier beginning where someone or something built humans, and so on ad infinitum, but Uncharles felt that was of diminishing relevance and needlessly metaphysical.

Why humans had built so many robot soldiers was unclear, although the robots themselves had a variety of theories to justify their existence. Uncharles heard that human soldiers were less capable of making war than robots, or else less willing and reliable than robots. He also heard that other humans elsewhere had built robot soldiers, and the local humans had then had to build their own to avoid there being a robot soldier gap.

Nobody seemed to ask why soldiers at all. Apparently the existence of soldiers was a fundamental given in their cosmology.

— Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

In 1478, when Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said that there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had been lately buried in San Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth. As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up the young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it down the streets amid frightful confusion, and at last threw it into the Po.

— The civilisation of the period of the renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt

“Judging by your face you don’t think much of the lesson.” “No. It’s rotten, isn’t it?” “Is it? Have we not to master the techniques before practising them?” “But technique and practice are the same thing! We can draw nothing well unless it interests us, and we only learn to draw it well by first drawing it badly, not by drawing what bores us stiff. Learning to draw from dead bulbs and boxes is like learning to make love with corpses.” One student grinned and muttered that that depended on the corpses. The other said sternly, “Are you a Communist?”

— Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canons) by Alasdair Gray (Page 226)