From Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun - Chapter 4
They want to eat others and at the same time they’re afraid that other people are going to eat them. That’s why they’re always watching each other with such suspicious looks in their eyes.
But all they’d have to do is give up that way of thinking and then they could travel about, work, eat, and sleep in perfect security. Think how happy they’d feel! It’s only a threshold, a pass. But what do they do instead? What is it that these fathers, sons, brothers, husbands. Wives, friends, teachers, students, enemies, and even people who don’t know each other really do? Why they all join together to hold each other back, and talk each other out of it!
That it! They’d rather die than take one little step