Thursday Quotables: Flatland

Welcome to Thursday Quotables, a weekly meme hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies. Every Thursday you can post a quote from a book that you're currently reading. It can be meaningful, funny, a real tearjerker or just something beautifully written. You decide. Click on the link above if you want to learn more.

Edwin A. Abbott's novella Flatland is a social satire, set in a two-dimensional Universe, where being an equilateral object means everything, and where the number of angles in your figure determines your place on the social ladder, with women, being straight lines on the bottom, and the priests, being circles, or polygons with a very large number of angles, at the top.

"When I call them Priests, let me not be understood as meaning no more than the term denotes with you. With us, our Priests, are Administrators of all Business, Art and Science; Directors of Trade, Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education; Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done by others."

So far, this has been the single best line in the whole book.

Have a great Thursday everyone!

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