Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

Hard words have never won a battle yet, but they’ve lost a few. You mean to kill a man, telling him so don’t help.’

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That’s why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite.’

‘Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it–there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.’