Evil for Evil (Engineer Trilogy, #2)

by K.J. Parker

The worst words a general can utter, his father had told him once, were, I never expected that.

it doesn’t matter if you’re ignorant so long as you can find people to know stuff for you. Stupidity is staying ignorant when you don’t have to.

Lots of things wrong with alcohol, but it has one redeeming virtue; it makes you stupid, and there are times when you need to be too stupid to do the intelligent thing.

A lie, he’d learned long ago, is often the mirror image of the truth; by examining it carefully, you can reconstruct the fact that lie was designed to conceal.

Dying only takes a moment or so and then it’s over, but marriage is forever.

The most useful machine in the shop is usually also the most dangerous.

the mortise doesn’t have to love the tenon, just so long as they fit snugly together and accept the dowel.

I just sort of realized that love is basically for teenagers, and when it comes to real life for grown-ups, you’re far better off with someone who’s moderately pleased to see you when you’re around, but who leaves you in peace when you’ve got things to do.

What a wonderful magic politics is, Psellus thought; it can recognize the truth and still override it, providing you can get consensus among the people who matter.

some people are monsters, they’re evil through and through; you tell yourself that so you can make sense of the world. It’s like believing in a religion, a god and a devil, all good on one side, all bad on the other. But that’s not how it is. Instead, you’ve got people who are capable of doing things that you can’t even bear to think about; for bloody certain you can’t ever forgive them. But they can still feel guilt and shame, they can still fall in love, try and do the right thing, appreciate what the right thing is — and then they cheerfully go and do the next unbelievably bad thing, and it all goes round again. So you tell yourself, it’s because they’re not right in the head, it’s an illness, they aren’t in control of what they do. That’s another easy way round it, and of course it isn’t true. And then you get people like me; and people like you, as well. It should be up to us to kill men like him on sight, like wolves, but we don’t. We talk ourselves into believing that it’d be wrong, which is just that same old belief again, an excuse for not facing something we can’t understand.

giving up is a privilege only granted to the weak.

There’s never any excuse for dying. It’s such a selfish thing to do, if there are people who love you.”