You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses. Elizabeth Moon
The vitality of children is clean and honest. Their petty shortcomings derive, in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, from their effete elders' pettiness. Contagion is a generational fact. But children can develop defenses against their elders' spiritual scurvy simply because they're new. Michael Bishop
No nation would refuse to fight an invading army because some expert argued it would be cheaper to invest in defenses against future invasions. It is not a matter of prioritising lives now over lives tomorrow. Epeli Ganilau
At the root of fear is low self-esteem. This explains why angry people have low self-esteem, are argumentative, stubborn, and quick to flare up yet slow to forgive. Those behaviors are defenses against the underlying fear. David J. Lieberman
Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate. Natalie Clifford Barney