Archivist: Weren't you curious about Union's blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America.  Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

Sonmi-451: You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist, I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An Abyss cannot be crossed in two steps". 

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell