The Wisdom of Crowds (The Age of Madness #3)

by Joe Abercrombie

But that was the experience of being a monarch. One shocking mouthful of shit after another.

“The thing about history is you don’t know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters.”

“Threats for tomorrow don’t cut very deep when today is so damn threatening.

But here’s the sorry truth—if you really don’t want a thing, you don’t have to keep telling yourself so.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Karl Marx

Here is how things end: not with some grand drama, but a shameful scuffle in a gate.

That’s marriage. People change, and not always in the way you want, and you’re chained together anyway.

“Vanity, a loud voice and a loose relationship with the truth,” whispered Zuri. “All the qualities of a successful politician.”

being a parent… there is no plan. It’s just a set of mistakes you hardly notice making.

The voice of the people… is just noise. It is the blather of the lunatics in the madhouse. It is the squeal of the pigs in the slaughterhouse. It is a choir of morons. Most of them don’t even know what they want, let alone how to get it. They need someone to tell them what to do.”