| # | Quote | Links |
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| 251 | One of the things that defines our character is how we handle our mistakes. | |
| 252 | One thing you’ll learn as you get older, Simon, is that when people tell you something unpleasant about themselves, it’s usually true. | |
| 253 | Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him. | |
| 254 | Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages. | |
| 255 | Only those with evil intent would make someone swear an oath of truth over a secret ritual. They require oaths of secrecy to control the minds of the believers, to subjugate and place them into bondage. | |
| 256 | Only you can achieve self-worth for yourself. Any group offering it to you, or demanding it of you, comes bearing chains of slavery. | |
| 257 | Our officer cadre thinks that mercenaries have no honor, because they can be bought and sold. But honor is a luxury only a free man can afford. A good Imperial officer like me isn’t honor-bound, he’s just bound. | |
| 258 | Over the course of Uthen's illness, Lark came to realize something - that death can sometimes seem desirable in abstract, but look quite different when it's in your path, up close and personal. | |
| 259 | Pattern, nothing is less funny than explaining humor... | |
| 260 | People on the bottom of systems always said they wanted equality, but did they, really? Or did they, deep down, yearn more to have the situation reversed? Did the oppressed really believe the ideals they espoused, or was that just rhetoric? Did they in fact really want to instead become the oppressors? | |
| 261 | People who hate don't usually recognize that vile taint within themselves. They spew their hatred as righteous. That corruption is what makes them so evil - and so dangerous. They are able to do the most despicable things and think themselves heroes for having done them. | |
| 262 | People who live in comfortable, settled towns with law-abiding citizens and a government to protect them, they never think of the men who came first, the ones who went through hell to build something. | |
| 263 | Politics ain't much different, Tyrel, than one of these iceburgs you hear tell of. Most of what goes on is beneath the surface. It doesn't make any difference how good a man is, or how good his ideas are, or even how honest he is unless he can put across a program, and that's politics. | |
| 264 | 'Profit' is a dirty word only to the leeches of the world. They want it seen as evil, so they can more easily snatch what they did not earn. | |
| 265 | Raising awareness for a cause is one thing, but to have a vocal minority impose its will onto the rest of us and then attempt to stifle dissent is outrageous... | |
| 266 | Rulers may be intelligent and shrewd, but they use their minds to gain power, not to try to understand the universe and our place in it. I think very few of them are really wise. | |
| 267 | She and her sister were dressed in purple, with gold buckles at their throats by way of brooches, and another gold buckle each at the end of hatpins which they wore through their grey hair in order apparently to match their brooches. Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected. | |
| 268 | She said the cafeteria must follow state guidelines; otherwise their funding could be jeopardized. | |
| 269 | She understood, now, why life had seemed so empty, so pointless: she herself had rendered it so in refusing to think. Nicci had been a slave to everyone of need. She had given her masters their only real weapon against her; she had surrendered to their twisted lies by putting the crippling chains of guilt around her own neck for them, giving herself freely into slavery to the whims and wishes of others instead of living her life as she should have - for herself. She had never asked why it was right for her to be a slave to another’s desires, but not evil for them to enslave her. She was not contributing to the betterment of mankind, but was merely a servant to countless puling little tyrants. Evil was not one large entity, but a ceaseless torrent of small wrongs left unchallenged, until they festered into monsters. | |
| 270 | Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man's life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit? | |
| 271 | So many vows... they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other. | |
| 272 | So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect. | |
| 273 | So... if you spurned a miracle because it seemed to come too easily, would you ever get another? | |
| 274 | Soldiers seemed to care a great deal for flags. She had never understood that. You could not kill a man with one. You could not protect yourself with one. And yet men would die for flags. | |
| 275 | Some people charged toward the goal, running for all they had. Others stumbled. But it wasn’t the speed that mattered. It was the direction they were going. | |
| 276 | Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can’t trade for your heart’s desire is your heart. | |
| 277 | Some say that the hardest part about living and honorable life is never giving in to temptation. They are wrong. The hardest part is picking yourself up afgter you've failed, standing up, and resuming your place on the Wall. | |
| 278 | Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose. | |
| 279 | Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended. The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours. | |
| 280 | Sometimes it is easier to pull a knife out of a man than to ask him to forget words you have uttered. | |
| 281 | Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. | |
| 282 | Spare me your musings. You had hoped, I doubt not, that once Count Vulk were down, the world were paradise. Not so; you that think to war and die for some high purpose will fall for less than nothing, since other Vulks with other names will always rise. For that, how dare you name these men rascals? The Dalarna you desire may be as desperate to them as theirs to you. | |
| 283 | Speech is speech, whether it comes from the pulpit, the lectern, or the stage - or the music box, for that matter. The old bastard knew that, and was deliberately trying to impose his own definition on it for his own purposes - which had nothing to do with the survival of democracy or even of morality. He knew damn well that if he could get the public to swallow censorship on the stage, it was only a matter of time before he'd be trying to censor conversation between friends, and enforcing it with wiretaps and agents provocateurs. | |
| 284 | Still, every person had to make choices for themselves. Those who lost sight of the values fought for and won in the past usually came to lose those values, leaving subsequent generations to have to fight to win them back, only for them to be squandered by their heirs, who didn’t have to face the struggle to gain them. | |
| 285 | Still, the Regis saw no reason to destroy the place; she merely constructed one of her hives atop the tallest structure - the 1,675-foot Trump Building, which the hive encased like a wasps' nest just short of its summit - and moved all potnetial troublemakers to nearby Protoculture farms. | |
| 286 | Such were the powers of nepotism already swaying me. I have said earlier that nepotism in theory is loathsome, but in practice it often works. Without it and its concurrent corrupt practices of selection and advancement Nelson would never have risen to command at Trafalgar. That it had kept me as a mere lieutenant was the reverse of the coin. | |
| 287 | Suddenly something had happened to me, and it happened to Orrin too. The world had burst wide open, and where our narrow valleys had been, our hog-backed ridges, our huddled towns and villages, there was now a world without end or limit. Where our world had been one of a few mountain valleys, it was now as wide as the earth itself, and wider, for where the land ended there was sky, and no end at all to that. | |
| 288 | Swante Taggart had never thought of himself as a brave man. The very word made him restless and irritable when it came into a conversation, as if men could be divided into the brave and the cowardly, as if brave men were always brave and the cowards always cowardly. It simply wasn't that way. A man did what he had to do. | |
| 289 | Teresa had skirmished much of her adult life among the cut-and-thrust front lines of female social structure, where words were wielded as weapons meant to draw blood. The higher the level of engagement, the more refined the edge. There, you had to be adept to know you had been cut and were bleeding, or the wound was all that much greater for others seeing it and you missing it, thus. | |
| 290 | That many do not advance in the Christian progress because they stick in penances, and particular exercises, while they neglect the love of GOD, which is the end. That this appeared plainly by their works, and was the reason why we see so little solid virtue. That there needed neither art nor science for going to GOD, but only a heart resolutely determined to apply itself to nothing but Him, or for His sake, and to love him only. | |
| 291 | That our sanctification did not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for GOD's sake, which we commonly do for our own. That it was lamentable to see how many people mistook the means for the end, addicting themselves to certain works, which they performed very imperfectly, by reason of their human or selfish regards. | |
| 292 | That proves you are unusual,... and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed. | |
| 293 | That's what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever's nearest, even if it's his own house! | |
| 294 | The art of diplomacy is the luck of knowing more of your rival’s secrets than he knows of yours. Always deal from a position of power. | |
| 295 | The attack by those who want to die - this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense. | |
| 296 | The best assassin is everyone's friend, not the quiet shade lurking in dark places. | |
| 297 | The boundaries of civilisation are not the impregnable walls civilised men take them for. As easily as smoke on the wind, they can dissolve. | |
| 298 | The COVID-19 pandemic is not deadly in spite of conventional care; it appears to be deadly because of it. | |
| 299 | The Founding Fathers believed faith in God was the key to our being a good people and America's becoming a great nation. | |
| 300 | The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than the men who laugh at them. | |