" If you’re an operative mage and you allow your magical work to become a matter of public knowledge, you can count on receiving a variety of inquiries. One of the most common is also one of the saddest and most futile. These come from people who have backed themselves into a corner, and want you to use magic to help them avoid the consequences. The nature of the corner they’ve backed into varies across the whole vast spectrum of human folly, but in every case the root of the trouble is the self-defeating conviction that they ought to be able to keep on doing the same thing over and over again, and get different results. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power