The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

Taxes, as I was to learn, were the best source of wealth for men who did not want to work,

Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.

His teaching made me unfit for the unthinking slaughter of strangers for no reason other than their strangeness.

‘One man against the dark?’ Galahad asked sceptically. ‘Wasn’t your Christ one man against the dark?’ I asked. Galahad thought for a second, staring into the fire that shadowed his strong face. ‘Christ,’ he said finally, ‘was our last chance. He told us to love one another, to do good to each other, to give alms to the poor, food to the hungry, cloaks to the naked. So men killed Him.’

Once you write something down it becomes fixed. It becomes dogma. People can argue about it, they become authoritative, they refer to the texts, they produce new manuscripts, they argue more and soon they’re putting each other to death. If you never write anything down then no one knows exactly what you said so you can always change it.