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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Empires are built and maintained with words. Swords are a mere precedent to the quill.”
“‘The wise man arms himself with knowledge before a sword,’”
“Even the eyes of the owl do not catch everything.”
It is amazing how fragile even great institutions of state can be; how quickly the world order can descend into chaos.
a host of mostly bad people looking to kill and maim under the pretext of righteousness.
“It is impossible to impress upon a man the severity of a situation until the point of its remedy is long past. ’Tis something to do with the nature of a human being, that ingrained idiocy.
“One cannot uphold the law if one does not follow it.
The law is the law; the day we abandon it for the sake of bloodshed is the day we abandon ourselves.”
“Only give battle in furtherance of a cause; one should never wage war as an end in itself.”
“Power does things to a man’s mind. It unlocks his baser instincts which the process of civilisation has before occluded. Powerful men are closer in mind to wild beasts than they are to their supposed human inferiors.”
“Justice is not vengeance, and vengeance is not justice. But the two often overlap. The state is as capable of vengeance as any individual, for what is the state if not the people that comprise it?”
