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| 201 | 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. | |
| 202 | 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. | |
| 203 | Pattern, nothing is less funny than explaining humor... | |
| 204 | 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. | |
| 205 | '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. | |
| 206 | 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... | |
| 207 | She said the cafeteria must follow state guidelines; otherwise their funding could be jeopardized. | |
| 208 | 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. | |
| 209 | Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man's life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit? | |
| 210 | 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. | |
| 211 | 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. | |
| 212 | So... if you spurned a miracle because it seemed to come too easily, would you ever get another? | |
| 213 | 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. | |
| 214 | 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. | |
| 215 | 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. | |
| 216 | Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose. | |
| 217 | Sometimes it is easier to pull a knife out of a man than to ask him to forget words you have uttered. | |
| 218 | 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. | |
| 219 | 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. | |
| 220 | 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. | |
| 221 | 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. | |
| 222 | 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. | |
| 223 | 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. | |
| 224 | 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. | |
| 225 | 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. | |
| 226 | 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. | |
| 227 | 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. | |
| 228 | That's what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever's nearest, even if it's his own house! | |
| 229 | 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. | |
| 230 | The attack by those who want to die - this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense. | |
| 231 | The boundaries of civilisation are not the impregnable walls civilised men take them for. As easily as smoke on the wind, they can dissolve. | |
| 232 | The COVID-19 pandemic is not deadly in spite of conventional care; it appears to be deadly because of it. | |
| 233 | The Founding Fathers believed faith in God was the key to our being a good people and America's becoming a great nation. | |
| 234 | The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than the men who laugh at them. | |
| 235 | The habit of truth is hard to learn, and a mixed blessing. It leaves no refuge when a new truth comes along that hurts. | |
| 236 | The heresy made a repulsive kind of sense. But then what else would he have expected? Where there was the work of God, would there not also be the work of the Devil, insinuating himself into the schemes of the Creator, trying to robe the miraculous in the mundane? | |
| 237 | The ideal reasoner,... would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. | |
| 238 | The mainstream media and the ruling class treat us like children. They preach the gospel of civility but mock us with disdain and condescension. | |
| 239 | The man I fear most is the one who preaches virtue and a better life while using people's good intentions to shade their eyes from the light of truth. | |
| 240 | The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. | |
| 241 | The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts. | |
| 242 | The notion that some people routinely get up at four o'clock in the morning is enough to give me shivers. I mean, that's usually maybe two hours after I've gone to bed! Maybe no hours at all, some night. | |
| 243 | The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y. | |
| 244 | The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced. Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality - it's our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see. | |
| 245 | The point is taken.... Yes - if the words of the song justify the behavior they wish to practice but have been taught not to, they will wish to believe those words. From there, it is only a very small step to persuade oneself that they are true.
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| 246 | The problem with Huck is that she's right just often enough to let her think it's a law of nature. | |
| 247 | The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. | |
| 248 | The shape of the government they made reflects the distrust these groups had for each other. | |
| 249 | The teacher who does not learn from his students does not teach. The student who sneers at his teacher's true knowledge is like one who chooses unripe grapes and scorns the sweet fruit of the vine which has been allowed to ripen in it's own time. | |
| 250 | The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession. | |