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Inauspicious beginnings often deliver the deadliest of warnings.
the world was heaven’s mirror, the tin kind, scratched and mottled and pitted as if to mock heaven’s own face.
Strange how things said that made no sense could stay in the memory, while all the truths just fell away, abandoned in the way of things that had little relevance.
‘As if physical violence isn’t the first choice of the intellectually challenged.’
Stupid people always had a reason to be angry but didn’t have the capacity to understand that they were angry because they were frustrated, and they were frustrated because they didn’t understand, and they didn’t understand because they were stupid.
Lad, the most powerful constant is stupidity. Nothing else comes close. Stupidity kills all the animals, empties the sky of birds, poisons the rivers, burns the forests, wages the wars, feeds the lies, invents the world over and over again in ways only idiots could think real. Stupidity, lad, will defeat every god, crush every dream, topple every empire. Because, in the end, stupid people outnumber smart people. If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t suffer over and over again, through generation after generation and on for ever.
All hope of freedom is lost when the past is a prison you will not leave,
Ignore the wheedling, the self-pity, the cries that we didn’t know any better. We did know better. We’ve always known better.
we’re here as servants of every citizen of the empire. Any soldier who forgets that isn’t worthy of the title.
Your sisters are doing what all sisters do, whispering and gossiping in their pack. Decisions will be made, and all the rules men once thought inviolate have now changed, though they know it not. Nightly, women reshape the world. It has always been this way.’
‘It is one thing to measure a man when all goes his way. See such a man thwarted, and his true nature is revealed.’
A nation depends upon its beliefs, the foundation stones of myths into which all manner of faith is instilled. The cynic is the myth-slayer, relentless in all discourse to disaffect the veracity of honest things. This one lives solely in the present, the disbeliever in the future, the denier of the past. Dead are the destroying eyes, empty the embittered words, relentless the fist in the faces of all who suffer.
What worth an empire that turns its back on helpless people, its own citizens or otherwise?
