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Unnumbered civilisations before ours are naught but dust and bones, and the greatest heroes of their age are forgotten legends.
You believe that the wall, separating civilisation from barbarism is as solid as steel, but it is not. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of pagan superstition, fear of the dark and the worship of fell beings in echoing fanes.’
Common decency and civil behaviour are just a thin veneer over the animal at the core of mankind that gets out whenever it has the chance.’
The time that has passed since civilisation began is but a fragment of the duration of our existence, and but a fragment of the ages yet to come.
most loathed of all, the army of civil administrators who followed in the wake of their conquests.
‘Bureaucracy and officialdom are taking over, Miss Vivar. Red tape, administrators and clerks are replacing the heroes of the age and unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as an empire will soon be a footnote in the history books.
‘It is not strange to mistake change for progress,
A wise man of Old Earth had once claimed that science would destroy mankind, not through its weapons of mass destruction, but through finally proving that there was no god. Such knowledge, he claimed, would sear the mind of man and leave him gibbering and insane with the realisation that he was utterly alone in an uncaring universe.
‘No,’ interrupted Karkasy, ‘I’m not. You Astartes stand above us mortals in all regards and you demand our respect, but that respect has to be earned. It requires your ethics to be without question. You not only have to stay above the line between right and wrong, you also have to stay well clear of the grey areas in-between.’
I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude – we’ve proven that time and time again. People are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and force action. They kill and revive, corrupt and cure.
If being an iterator has taught me anything, it’s that men of words – priests, prophets and intellectuals – have played a more decisive role in history than any military leaders or statesmen.
‘War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueller it is, the sooner it is over.’
