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Dim people ride a mule to their conclusions; bright ones ride a racehorse. But not always in the right direction.
He has something of greatness in him, and that makes small, powerful men feel small and powerless, and there’s nothing they hate more.”
If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?
“I kin understand it when a man throws back a few too many drinks on a lonesome night, gets sour inside, and sucks at the teat of a musket for jus’ long enough so that big ole ‘fuck you’ we scream at the world bounces back as ‘fuck me’ and he pulls the trigger.
And we’re all a hair trigger’s pull from the musket’s dare. It’s the devil’s gift, ain’t it? It’s the heritage o’ man, aye?”
For good and ill, history’s written with a blood-dipped quill.
Of all the things that die, hope is the most easily resurrected.
Still, artists being assholes? What else was new?
Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything. Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.
This is how life gets cheap. Someone teaches you how easy it is to kill. Someone gives you permission. The next moment it simply seems like the thing to do.
War is the wily orator who gets us cheering horrors.
Slavery is what happens when men act on their desire to be gods, and slavery shows what kind of gods you’d be.
Warriors know how to honor a hero’s sacrifice: first you finish the fucking fight.
“We keep secret what we fear makes us weak, not realizing in our fear that it is the keeping of secrets itself that weakens us.”
