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kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality.
That was when the melancholy he had been carrying seemed to break him open, and the face of his lost daughter was confounded in his heart with the face of the young prince of the Khazars, who, having been apprehended by these soldiers, must eventually be conveyed by them to the usurper Buljan, their commander. It was the business of the world, Amram knew to manufacture and consume orphans, and in that work fatherly love was mere dross to be burned away. After long years of blessed absence, the return of merciful feelings toward what was, after all, only another motherless and fatherless child,
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The wind of righteous adventure that had begun to sweep through the square subsided as this secret captain and master of the accumulated lore of soldierly skepticism began to explain that any king who controlled both the treasury and the army was, in the eyes of the world, legitimate, and that while no one could know the mind of God, the Almighty had in the past shown a marked tendency, in his view, to ratify public opinion.
All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men.”
“I don’t save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.”
“Not always,” said his nephew, a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all of his energies, as far as Joseph could see, on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience. “War creates opportunities too.”
She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence,
