I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature. I have gotten people into tongue-tied snits unable to name for me one scene in which Yoda is ever helpful to anybody, or says anything that’s genuinely wise. 'Do or do not, there is no try.' Up yours, you horrible little oven mitt! 'Try' is how human beings get better. That’s how people learn, they try some of their muscles, or their Force mechanism heads in the right direction, that part gets reinforced and rewarded with positive feedback, which you never give. And parts of it get repressed by saying, 'No, that you will not do!' It is abhorrent, junior high school Zen. It’s cartoon crap.

Self-righteousness is an especially heady condition that all of us have experienced at one time or another. Those who are honest will admit there is something sickly-sweet and alluring about knowing you are right, while others are terribly wrong.

"He approached the great glass barrier dividing the room, and the speaker at the end of the table. "Cyclops?" he whispered, stepping closer, clearing his tight throat, "Cyclops, it's me, Gordon."
The glow in the pearly lens was subdued. But the row of little lights still flashed — a complex pattern that repeated over and over like an urgent message from a distant ship in some lost code — ever, hypnotically, the same.
Gordon felt a frantic dread rise within him, as when, during his boyhood, he had encountered his grandfather lying perfectly still on the porch swing, and feared to find that the beloved old man had died.
The pattern of lights repeated, over and over.
Gordon wondered. How many people would recall, after the hell of the last seventeen years, that the parity displays of a great supercomputer never repeated themselves? Gordon remembered a cyberneticist friend telling him the patterns of light were like snowflakes, none ever the same as any other.
"Cyclops," he said evenly, "Answer me! I demand you answer — in the name of decency! In the name of the United St — "
He stopped. He couldn't bring himself to meet this lie with another. Here, the only living mind he would fool would be himself.
The room was warmer than it had seemed during his interview. He looked for, and found, the little vents through which cool air could be directed at a visitor seated in the guest chair, giving an impression of great cold just beyond the glass wall.
"Dry ice," he muttered, "to fool the citizens of Oz.