" I want to begin my fight for the future of our world with the sharing of a vision. Everyone has, or should have, a vision. This is mine.
It is a simple vision, really. It begins with the creation of a single, sane, planetary civilization. That will have to be very much like a utopia. People will deny the possibility of such a dream. They will say that people have always been at each other's throats, that this is just human nature, the way of the world. That we can never change the world.
But that is just silly. That is like saying that two battling brothers, children, will never grow up to be the best of friends who watch each other’s backs. Once, a long time ago, people lost their sons and daughters to the claws of big cats. In classic times, the Greeks and the Romans saw slavery as evil, but as a necessary evil that could never go away. Only seventy years ago, Germany and France came to death blows in the greatest war in history; now they share a common currency, open borders, and a stake in the future of Europe. The Scandinavians once terrorized the world as marauding Vikings gripping bloody axes and swords, while now their descendents refrain from spanking their children, and big blond–haired men turn their hands to the care of babies.
We all have a sense of what this new civilization must look like: No war. No hunger. No want. No very wealthy using their money to manipulate laws and lawmakers so that they become ever more wealthy while they cast the poor into the gutters like garbage. The wasteland made green again. Oceans once more teeming with life. The human heart finally healed. A new story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and new songs that we sing to our children. The vast resources once mobilized for war and economic supremacy now poured into a true science of survival and technologies of the soul.
I want this to be. But how can it be? How will we get from a world on the brink of destruction to this glorious, golden future?
I do not know. It is not for any one person to know, for to create the earth anew we will need to call upon the collective genius and the good will of the entire human race. We will need all our knowledge of history, anthropology, religion, and science, and much else. We will need a deep, deep sympathy for human nature, in both its terrible and angelic aspects. "

― David Zindell , Splendor