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“The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise up!” Elysée Loustallot
Threats for tomorrow don’t cut very deep when today is so damn threatening.
“Can I ask what you did want?” “The same as you. The same as all of us.” He did not smile. He did not frown. “A better world.”
if you really don’t want a thing, you don’t have to keep telling yourself so.
“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.” Gustave Le Bon
“When I was a boy,” muttered Curnsbick, “patriotism was kissing the flag and pretending to love the king. Now, suddenly, it’s spitting on the king and having poor furniture. One must keep a close eye on the current definitions. To be unpatriotic would be terrible. To be patriotic in the wrong way could be fatal. I feel I can admit to you, as an old friend, that since the Great Change… I am constantly terrified.”
“They’re monsters,” Orso heard her whisper. “I almost wish they were,” he muttered. “That would be easier. But they’re just people.” “They’re the worst people I ever saw.” “Of course they are. We hanged all the best ones. The ones who might have helped, might have compromised, might have built bridges, we left dangling over the road to Valbeck. Of course they are cruel, and greedy, and brutal. Those are the lessons we taught. That was the example we set.”
“I’m innocent!” But it was far too late for that. It was too late the moment they were put in the dock. There was only one real conspiracy here. To find people to blame, and they were all complicit.
“Life surely has a way of bringing old offences back to haunt you.”
“Man who’ll be loyal to someone might one day up and decide he’d rather be loyal to someone else.” He wagged a finger at Clover. “But a man who’s first loyalty is to himself? It always will be. You don’t pretend to be what you’re not. You’re reliable.”
“Secrets, in my experience, rarely stay buried.”
She had heard it said that every woman ends up marrying her father. Until that moment, she had always imagined herself the exception.
Chances are that men who’ll hurt folk for one master won’t flinch at hurting folk for another. It’s a job. A potter doesn’t need a grand cause to shape his clay for, does he? Why hold a thug to a higher standard?
He’d promised no more trouble, and now here he was fucking it, or letting it fuck him, maybe, on the floor of the Lords’ Round. Or whatever they were calling it now. He was crying while he did it, maybe. At least to begin with. But that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it.
Mutual suspicion is the best basis for an alliance. Everyone knows where they stand.
Sholla leaned close. “D’you reckon there comes a time when you’ve betrayed folk so often that there’s no one left to betray?” Clover gave a weary sigh. “We may find out.”
Seems giving little men big men’s shoes doesn’t make ’em big. Just makes ’em trip over.
“The sad truth is, men love to follow a man other men fear,” said Clover. “Makes them feel fearsome, too.
Strange, how much of his time he’d spent worrying about what people expect. You’d have thought the one upside of being a famous warrior was doing whatever you pleased.
A great fighter must not only know when to fight, but when not to,
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Karl Marx
Too much trust could kill you in a heartbeat.
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.
“Vanity, a loud voice and a loose relationship with the truth,” whispered Zuri. “All the qualities of a successful politician.”
“Truth is—and take it from someone who spent a dozen years in prison—in the end, people don’t really care much about being free. They want to be warm and well fed and to not have to worry. In particular, they want to not have to worry about being thrown off a tower for wearing the wrong shoes.”
the vast majority of us are cowards the vast majority of the time.”
being a parent… there is no plan. It’s just a set of mistakes you hardly notice making.
“I suppose we can do good things for bad reasons.” “Or bad things for good ones,” he answered.
“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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“What is the point of gathering knowledge if one does not pass it on? What is the point of growing old if one does not try to shape the future?”
“Is this how it always is? You get what you wanted, but somehow it’s not what you wanted at all? Every victory turns out to be just another kind of defeat?”
