You can make the Ring an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that awaits all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work.
J. R. R. Tolkien, speaking on the central figure of the One Ring in his books The Lord of the Rings, in a letter to his publisher (July 31, 1947); published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien(1981), Letter 109.
Il est bien malaisé (puisqu’il faut enfin m’expliquer)
d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire — François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778) — Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Troisième Entretien.
Cowards are nice, they’re interesting, they’re gentle, they wouldn’t think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They’re very brave.
William Saroyan, Madness in the Family (1988).
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston, There Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.
A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain.
William Saroyan, Madness in the Family (1988).
It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. No ever, in the long history of the world.
Taylor Caldwell, “Honoria” (1957); republished in The New American, Vol. 19, No. 20 (October 6, 2003).