A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (The Siege, #3)

by K.J. Parker

Two of the principal tenets of the Echmen faith are: love your neighbour and forgive your enemy. They’re realistic enough to admit that these are things you should aspire to rather than actually do, but it’s a noble ambition

They figure that lucky people crash through a basically unlucky world like the bows of a ship, drenching bystanders with a wake of corrosive misfortune, and are therefore best shunned as sources of danger and grief.

Moral: even the humblest of us can make a difference, and it’s love that makes the world go round, or at least wobble horribly.

It’s cold scientific fact that the universe is composed of two basic elements, Us and Them, always opposed in fundamental, irreconcilable conflict. The fact that we may like individual Them loads more than we like any of Us is neither here nor there. When it turns into an Us-against-Them issue, we can no more side with Them than water can flow uphill.

Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.

The seventh axiom states that out of every ten battles, two are won by the victors whereas eight are lost by the losers.

All human life has value, even the lives of shitheads and arseholes, but then again, you can’t make omelettes, so on and so forth. On balance I’d rather see six dozen senior officers trampled into squashed bags of broken bone than the same number of other ranks. No real logic to that, of course, but there you go.

“The truth’s the truth, that’s it’s defining quality. Either a thing’s true or it isn’t. But tell me this. If I don’t believe in a thing and everybody else in whole wide world does, what then?” He smiled. “A thing is true because we believe it. If we stop believing, it stops being true.”

“We stop believing because new evidence comes along.” “You think that? How sweet. No, really it’s all about fashion, like hairdos and hemlines and tassels on cushions. We believe something because people we think are really cool tell us it’s true. Then we shape the evidence to fit, like a blacksmith bending iron. Or we just believe, because the truth is so self-evident it needs no proof, and no proof can shake our belief.”