How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It (The Siege #2)

by K.J. Parker

What, after all, is belief but knowing something without actually being able to prove it?

The emperor’s wedding night symbolises, in some way I’d rather not dwell on, the marriage between the supreme ruler, Vice-Gerent of Heaven and Brother of the Invincible Sun, and his loving and obedient people;

(The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people’s lives.)

Personally, I always feel that survival is cheap at any price and it puzzles me that so many men in authority don’t seem to see it that way.

Everything changes, see above. Nothing changes more often, more rapidly or more radically than the past. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Yesterday’s eternal truths are today’s exploded myths. Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely.

Let’s get rid of this menace, once and for all is always wildly popular, because it appears to promise a solution and nobody will have to think hard about the real problem or do the things that actually need to be done; instead, just blot a few people out and move on.

The crucial element is numbers. Kill several million, and inevitably you’re a monster. But if you restrict yourself to a relatively modest number, say one or two per cent of the population, fifty thousand people at the absolute maximum, you’re a statesman and a hero and the father of your country.

are,” said the new colonel of engineers, a fifteen-year veteran who’d got the job because everyone better qualified was now dead,

After all, they work, or they work every bit as well as anything else does in this life.

Moral: it’s amazing what people will stand for, if the government tell them to.

Anyone who thinks killing inconvenient people and sending soldiers to burn down cities is a good idea is Ogus, sooner or later.