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July 8 - August 6, 2024
“If you only listen to lessons you like you’ll learn nothing.
Lost in the anonymity of a crowd, people would commit horrors that would have sickened them alone. That no doubt sickened them afterwards. But their regret was scant consolation for the victims.
Pain is the price of doing the right thing,
It was better not to mention things unless you were sure of the right language. Every day brought new wrong words to avoid. New ideas at odds with the Great Change. Everyone was free to say what they wanted now, of course. You just had to be careful in case it got you hanged.
“Faith must be shaken from time to time, or it becomes rigid. An excuse for any outrage. I have come to believe that the righteous… should always have doubts.”
But here’s the sorry truth—if you really don’t want a thing, you don’t have to keep telling yourself so.
Orso had intimate personal experience of government and felt petty selfishness, incompetence and bad luck were far more likely explanations for its shortcomings than intricate webs of malice spanning the Circle of the World. But then they were far less satisfying explanations, too. He rather wished the wilder theories were true. Had there been half as many secret monarchists as people claimed he would never have been deposed.
It belonged in a temple, not a court. The irony, of course, was that the Burners had burned the temples. So they had turned the Lords’ Round into a temple and called it a court. And none are more fanatical in their faith than the convert.
“The past has never interested me. For better or worse it is done, and set, and littered with disappointments as a battlefield is littered with the dead. But the future is a ploughed field, full of potential. The future we can twist into wonderful shapes.
“History is not the story of battles between right and wrong, but between one man’s right and another’s. Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man’s notion of good when it differs from ours.”
it’s that what really happened doesn’t matter half so much as what people want to hear.
He was crying while he did it, maybe. At least to begin with. But that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it.
In the end, the only thing a man can really do is pick his moment. Watch for the opening, and recognise it when it comes, and seize it.
One cannot climb high without standing on others, and all she had wanted was to reach the top. What a waste it all seemed now. There is nothing at the summit, in the end, but a long drop.
Her mother had always warned her a man is judged by his best moment, a woman by her worst.
Her father would’ve said it’s a good thing, to show mercy. Long as you also show, when it’s needful, that you can make of your heart a stone.
“Vanity, a loud voice and a loose relationship with the truth,” whispered Zuri. “All the qualities of a successful politician.”
The past isn’t made of facts, not really, just stories people tell to make themselves feel better. To make themselves look better.
“Sometimes loyalty’s an excuse for something else,”
But there comes a time you have to say no to what you’re given and reach for what you want.
“It’s a comfort, telling yourself there’s some big right thing out there. That you could seek some wise old bastard in the mountains who’s got the answer. Then there’d be no need for doubts and regrets.” He looked sideways, sunlight glinting off his metal eye. “But far as I can tell it ain’t that simple. Right things, wrong things, well… it’s all a matter of where you stand. Every choice is good for some, bad for others. And once you’re chief, you can’t just do what’s good for you, or those you love. You have to find what’s best for most. Worst for fewest. Like your father tried to, and with
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“Great folk are great ’cause they plant new footsteps. Not ’cause they blunder through the same mistakes some other bastards made.”
“In the end… the only thing a man can really do… is pick his moment. Watch for the opening, and recognise it when it comes, and seize it.” And Clover snatched at a handful o’ nothing and shook his fist. “Picking your moment. That’s the secret. You understand?”
“If we sponge away the evidence of our failures, how are we ever to learn from them?
