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Scheme Quotes

Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.
I exile Jude Duarte to the mortal world. Until and unless she is pardoned by the crown, let her not step one foot in Faerie or forfeit her life.'

'I gasp. 'But you can't do that!'

He looks at me for a long moment, but his gaze is mild, as though he's expecting me to be fine with exile. As though I am nothing more than one of his petitioners. As though I am nothing at all. 'Of course I can,' he replies.
...
Our eyes meet, and the odd smile on his face is clearly meant for me. I remember what it was to hate him with the whole of my heart, but I've remembered too late.
There were three ways to kill a king:
You could face him with all the force of your military might, and in the end one of you would fall.
You could stab him from behind like a coward, cringing in the shadows.
Or you could kill him slowly, from the inside out, so he wouldn't even know until it was too late. If you did your job right, he might even thank you for it.
These were the differences between Soldiers, Assassins, and Politicians.
Only Politicians did it with a certain flair.
Since 1849 I have studied incessantly, under all its aspects, a question which was already in my mind since 1832. I confess that my scheme is still a mere dream, and I do not shut my eyes to the fact that so long as I alone believe it to be possible, it is virtually impossible. ... The scheme in question is the cutting of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. This has been thought of from the earliest historical times, and for that very reason is looked upon as impracticable. Geographical dictionaries inform us indeed that the project would have been executed long ago but for insurmountable obstacles. [On his inspiration for the Suez Canal.]
The pressures of life created a diamond, now what I leave behind is a legacy. This game is betrayal. Everyone brags about being real but it's a false sense of a two sided man, an incorporated brand,
There's no future in this front. Operating a strategy mathematically created; persistently and perfectly knitted to keep the mass dependent on its assistancy.
In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventure and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, "not only because of his intimacy with her," as Josephus has it, "but also because of being under the influence of drugs." To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.