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| 301 | There is no law that cannot be twisted against its original purpose... no law that the powerful cannot corrupt to misuse - but that corruption can be purged, the twists unwound. Without the law, everyone is a victim sooner or later. If we defend the law; it will protect the weak more often than not. | |
| 302 | There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet.
Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreampt up took them further in. He was fascinated. | |
| 303 | There will be people like this in any culture, for every society is made of individuals. You must learn this. Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail. | |
| 304 | There would be trouble enough, but a man is born to trouble, and it is best to meet it when it comes and not lose sleep until it does. | |
| 305 | There’s a difference between thinking an action is wise and doing it. | |
| 306 | Therefore, parent of he that liveth in the God-blessed testosterone fog, train your son that he is not free to use, abuse, abandon, desert, ignore, overlook, disregard, forget, avoid, mistreat or neglect that which gets placed under his care; and if, if he does, he is to have his backside whupped. | |
| 307 | There's more to being a woman than what happens with a man in bed, believe me. You should learn that. What you can give a man in bed he can get from any street woman, what he wants from a wife is that, but much more. He wants tenderness, understanding, the feeling of working together for something.
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| 308 | There's no job so simple it can't get messy if you don't pay attention to it. | |
| 309 | There's nothing quite so invigorating, so freeing, as piloting a gasoline-powered vehicle along an open road. Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can't be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still - always, always - remember this special and exhilarating night... | |
| 310 | These headlines are written often at the insistence of uneducated circulation managers, who know nothing except how to husle sheets, and insist on a bigger headline and a more startling shock than the opposition has. | |
| 311 | They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams - and still calls for more. | |
| 312 | They gave me a terrible handicap with my peers. At least when I was a teenager. I don't mean the name. They deprived me of the definitive adolescent experience - thinking my parents didn't love me. Believing they didn't understand me. | |
| 313 | They judge a man out here by his honesty and his courage, and it's right they should. Most ways a man can go in this country he goes into danger, so you want a man alongside you who has guts. You don't want to start a wagon across the trails with a coward who'll quit the first time you run into trouble... he'll get you killed.
And if you're doing business out here, a man's word has to be good. We don't have lawyers and courts to decide, and we don't have a lot of legal nonsense to go through. If I buy cattle from a man and he tells me he's got ten thousand head, there'd better be ten thousand head... but there will be. No need to count 'em.
That's why if a man is called a coward or a liar it's a shooting matter. Nobody wants to associate or do business with either. Man can't afford to let folks call him either one. | |
| 314 | They never experienced disappointment. They have just had a wonderfully smooth life. What you've done, you have handicapped that boy for the rest of his life. He will be a weak, soft, ineffective man. | |
| 315 | They're all actors, you see, and can never quite remember when they're offstage. There's an audience available, so every one of them must have his or her say. | |
| 316 | Things are always changing in your world. Your lives are so short there is no continuity. Just as soon as one of you begins to accomplish a measurable task, he dies, and the next generation undoes all he worked for. Or, worse, they ignore the lessons he learned and make the same mistakes over again. I am not afraid that the world will pass me by while I sit here in this prison your shugenja conjured.... I know that in a thousand years, when this spell finally fades away, you humans will still be making the same mistakes you are today, guarding the same wall and fighting the same feuds. | |
| 317 | Thinking is not always… comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. | |
| 318 | This coin is worth more than the others because people think it is. They expect it to be. The most important things in the world are worth only what people will pay for them. If you can raise someone’s expectation… if you can make them need something… that is the source of wealth. Owning things of value is secondary to creating things of value where none once existed. | |
| 319 | This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths - just because they can't think of an original idea of their own... | |
| 320 | Those who are far from insane often act in an irrational manner. Don't excuse such conscious and deliberate actions with so convenient an explanation as insanity. | |
| 321 | To have killed men is not a thing of which one can be proud. A man uses a gun when necessary, and not too often, or carelessly. | |
| 322 | Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books. For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger. | |
| 323 | Truly, pride is a foolish item in a man's baggage! | |
| 324 | Truth didn't wear a tongue smooth; lies did. | |
| 325 | Under the direction of the brothers, the collective of the Order, like any autocratic ruler, ultimately ruled only by the acquiesce of the people, who were controlled either by moral intimidation, or by physical threat, or by both. Tyranny required constant tending, lest the illusion of righteous authority evaporate in the light of its grim toll, and the brutes be overpowered by the people who greatly outnumbered them. | |
| 326 | Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium - Y2K - when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed. | |
| 327 | Valuable lessons! Arlo realized that there was more to assuming leadership than giving directions or deciding broad policy. He had to use his mind and be ready to accept the advice of those whose minds were better than his.
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| 328 | Vegetarianism is known and practiced on Kregen; but if a man is starving and a fat deer passes by - well, a man must live unless he wishes to surrender to the fate high ideals may bring. It is an argument that continues. | |
| 329 | Verence wasn't frightened, however; not simply because it is difficult to be in fear of anything when the bits you need to be frightened with are curdling several yards away, but because he had never really been frightened of anything in his life, and wasn't going to start now. This was partly because he didn't have the imagination, but he was also one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time.
Most people aren't. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is - anticipating the future, or holding onto the past. They're usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It's already happening to them. | |
| 330 | Villains don't think they're evil. Villains don't believe they're the bad guy. Villains believe in what they're doing. Villains think they're righteous, and that's what makes them dangerous.... There's a trap in wringing your hands together and going 'Mwahaha' - that's not villainy. The villainy to be afraid of is the villainy you don't see coming. He's sweet, he's pleasant and polite. He sneaks up on you. And you don't know he's a villain until he's got a knife buried in you. Now that's a villain. | |
| 331 | Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble. | |
| 332 | War is the last option of the state that has failed... | |
| 333 | We all have to die, Johnrock - every one of us. It is how we choose to live that matters. After all, it’s the only life each one of us will ever have, so how we live is of paramount importance. | |
| 334 | We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. | |
| 335 | We do not always see clearly into the motives of people whom we do not know well, and if they appear to agree with our own wishes, transfer our own desires into their actions. | |
| 336 | We rode swiftly into the growing light, a tight bunch of armed horsemen, grimfaced and bitter with the loss of Aaron Stark and our cattle. No longer were we simply hard-working, hard-riding men, no longer quiet men intent on our own affairs. For riding after lawless men was not simply for revenge or recovery of property; it was necessary if there was to be law, and here there was no law except what right-thinking men made for them selves. | |
| 337 | Well, his parents had had their episodes, that was true. Marriage was not an end to a struggle, but a beginning to a long process of working together, against vanities and false pride and arrogance. And that intimacy was a prize to be won, again and again, every day. It was not the fruit of a magic spell worked by a priest at the altar. He knew that well, and was braced for it, even eager.... | |
| 338 | Well, you have a good start. Admitting that you don't know something is the first step to learning.... Every day, I amaze myself with all I don't know. | |
| 339 | What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. | |
| 340 | What is government but theft by consent? You'll be moving in a society of kindred spirits. | |
| 341 | What is more frightening? The danger you already dread, or the trick the universe hasn't pulled on you yet? The one to make all prior concerns seem moot. | |
| 342 | Whatever you want to call it, {+ bullshit} can be defined as:
Communications where reality and truthfulness aren’t nearly as vital as the ability to manipulate the audience to get it to do whatever one wants done. | |
| 343 | When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. | |
| 344 | When it comes to faith, what men fear most is the truth they already know in their heart, yet deny. | |
| 345 | When you are willing to meekly sacrifice your ultimate value, your life, the only one you will ever have, to any thug who on a whim decides to take it from you, then you can't be helped. You may be able to be rescued for one day, but the next day another will come and you will again willingly prostrate yourself before him. You have placed the value of the life of your killer above your own. | |
| 346 | When you grant to anyone who demands it the right of life or death over you, you have already become a willing slave in search of any butcher who will have you. | |
| 347 | When you stop testing claims by reason and evidence, you're apt to believe anything that sounds impressive, and when it's something you see, well! You're going to believe it, bad or good. | |
| 348 | When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it.... Goes double for the ones you tell yourself. | |
| 349 | When you won, it was always better to win quickly and with extreme advantage. | |
| 350 | When you're as old as I am... you'll realize that governments don't know what they can't do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction. | |