Dio

“Cid Arthur found more than poverty when he escaped his father's palace. He found sickness, too. As did I. The Gray Rot had been on Emesh for some years, brought by some unscrupulous trader from off world. The natives had no immunity, and the animalcule chewed through like paper and festered in the street. I was palatine. I was immune, Mother Earth have mercy on me.
Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to sit in the belly of an epidemic, untouched by it? I felt like a ghost. My body's almost-alien biochemistry--the legacy of tens of generations and of millions of Imperials marks worth of genetic recombination--preserved me from every weeping sore, every bout of necrosis, every bleeding cough. It sounds like a blessing. It is no blessing to watch other men die, even less to watch the ones you love waste away. When I started this account, I thought to skip this part, so painful was my loss of Cat. But I was wrong. She matters. She must matter.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“The ancients used to complain that the stars of heaven were too numerous to suppose that we were the only life, the only inheritors of the universe. They used to think it strange that no other races cried out into the darkness, their radio waves and noise blasting across the unending Dark. The truth we discovered when our long ships plied the oceans of night and planted flags on far shores was simple. We were the first. The Chantry took that fact to heart, declaring loudly and often that the stars were *ours*. That they belonged to the Children of Earth. They built their religion on that essential fact as much as they did on a fear of the corrupting power of technology and the pollution of the human form. We had a right to conquest, they claimed, as the ancient Spaniards had claimed when their sad ships crashed ashore.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“You might think this an unfair moral problem to force upon a simple window washer, but there’s a certain arrogance in that kind of reasoning. A window washer can think, same as anyone else, and their lives are no less complex. And as I’ve warned you, “simple” labor often leaves plenty of time for thought.

Yes, intellectuals and scholars are paid to think deep thoughts—but those thoughts are often owned by others. It is a great irony that society tends to look down on those who sell their bodies, but not on those who lease out their minds.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Perhaps the Chantry's icona are real. Perhaps those spirits hear our prayers. Perhaps not. I have always considered myself agnostic, but you see, to a peasant, a serf who has never seen the Emperor--to him, our Emperor and those gods are the same. His Radiance's laws still affect the provincial, even when there is no Emperor at all. It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must be real. The universe is, and we are in it.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence