The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

by T.H. White

for it has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else

the evil was in the bad people who abused it, not in the feudal system.

Oh no

As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life,

You have NO idea

You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt.

It is good to put your life in other people’s hands.

few people can hate so bitterly and so self-righteously as the members of a ruling caste which is being dispossessed.

The situation became divorced from common sense, so that atrocity stories were accepted by the atrocious people. Many of the barons whom Lancelot had to put down had worked themselves into such a state about him, through fear of losing their ancient powers, that they believed him to be a sort of poison-gas man.

“I wish I had never been born.” “So do I, my poor boy. But you are born, so now we must do the best we can.”