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| 301 | These headlines are written often at the insistence of uneducated circulation managers, who know nothing except how to husle sheets, and insist on a bigger headline and a more startling shock than the opposition has. | |
| 302 | They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams - and still calls for more. | |
| 303 | They gave me a terrible handicap with my peers. At least when I was a teenager. I don't mean the name. They deprived me of the definitive adolescent experience - thinking my parents didn't love me. Believing they didn't understand me. | |
| 304 | They judge a man out here by his honesty and his courage, and it's right they should. Most ways a man can go in this country he goes into danger, so you want a man alongside you who has guts. You don't want to start a wagon across the trails with a coward who'll quit the first time you run into trouble... he'll get you killed.
And if you're doing business out here, a man's word has to be good. We don't have lawyers and courts to decide, and we don't have a lot of legal nonsense to go through. If I buy cattle from a man and he tells me he's got ten thousand head, there'd better be ten thousand head... but there will be. No need to count 'em.
That's why if a man is called a coward or a liar it's a shooting matter. Nobody wants to associate or do business with either. Man can't afford to let folks call him either one. | |
| 305 | They never experienced disappointment. They have just had a wonderfully smooth life. What you've done, you have handicapped that boy for the rest of his life. He will be a weak, soft, ineffective man. | |
| 306 | They're all actors, you see, and can never quite remember when they're offstage. There's an audience available, so every one of them must have his or her say. | |
| 307 | Things are always changing in your world. Your lives are so short there is no continuity. Just as soon as one of you begins to accomplish a measurable task, he dies, and the next generation undoes all he worked for. Or, worse, they ignore the lessons he learned and make the same mistakes over again. I am not afraid that the world will pass me by while I sit here in this prison your shugenja conjured.... I know that in a thousand years, when this spell finally fades away, you humans will still be making the same mistakes you are today, guarding the same wall and fighting the same feuds. | |
| 308 | Thinking is not always… comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. | |
| 309 | This coin is worth more than the others because people think it is. They expect it to be. The most important things in the world are worth only what people will pay for them. If you can raise someone’s expectation… if you can make them need something… that is the source of wealth. Owning things of value is secondary to creating things of value where none once existed. | |
| 310 | This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths - just because they can't think of an original idea of their own... | |
| 311 | Those who are far from insane often act in an irrational manner. Don't excuse such conscious and deliberate actions with so convenient an explanation as insanity. | |
| 312 | Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books. For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger. | |
| 313 | Truly, pride is a foolish item in a man's baggage! | |
| 314 | Truth didn't wear a tongue smooth; lies did. | |
| 315 | Under the direction of the brothers, the collective of the Order, like any autocratic ruler, ultimately ruled only by the acquiesce of the people, who were controlled either by moral intimidation, or by physical threat, or by both. Tyranny required constant tending, lest the illusion of righteous authority evaporate in the light of its grim toll, and the brutes be overpowered by the people who greatly outnumbered them. | |
| 316 | Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium - Y2K - when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed. | |
| 317 | Valuable lessons! Arlo realized that there was more to assuming leadership than giving directions or deciding broad policy. He had to use his mind and be ready to accept the advice of those whose minds were better than his.
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| 318 | Vegetarianism is known and practiced on Kregen; but if a man is starving and a fat deer passes by - well, a man must live unless he wishes to surrender to the fate high ideals may bring. It is an argument that continues. | |
| 319 | Verence wasn't frightened, however; not simply because it is difficult to be in fear of anything when the bits you need to be frightened with are curdling several yards away, but because he had never really been frightened of anything in his life, and wasn't going to start now. This was partly because he didn't have the imagination, but he was also one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time.
Most people aren't. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is - anticipating the future, or holding onto the past. They're usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It's already happening to them. | |
| 320 | Villains don't think they're evil. Villains don't believe they're the bad guy. Villains believe in what they're doing. Villains think they're righteous, and that's what makes them dangerous.... There's a trap in wringing your hands together and going 'Mwahaha' - that's not villainy. The villainy to be afraid of is the villainy you don't see coming. He's sweet, he's pleasant and polite. He sneaks up on you. And you don't know he's a villain until he's got a knife buried in you. Now that's a villain. | |
| 321 | Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble. | |
| 322 | War is the last option of the state that has failed... | |
| 323 | We all have to die, Johnrock - every one of us. It is how we choose to live that matters. After all, it’s the only life each one of us will ever have, so how we live is of paramount importance. | |
| 324 | We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. | |
| 325 | We do not always see clearly into the motives of people whom we do not know well, and if they appear to agree with our own wishes, transfer our own desires into their actions. | |
| 326 | We rode swiftly into the growing light, a tight bunch of armed horsemen, grimfaced and bitter with the loss of Aaron Stark and our cattle. No longer were we simply hard-working, hard-riding men, no longer quiet men intent on our own affairs. For riding after lawless men was not simply for revenge or recovery of property; it was necessary if there was to be law, and here there was no law except what right-thinking men made for them selves. | |
| 327 | Well, his parents had had their episodes, that was true. Marriage was not an end to a struggle, but a beginning to a long process of working together, against vanities and false pride and arrogance. And that intimacy was a prize to be won, again and again, every day. It was not the fruit of a magic spell worked by a priest at the altar. He knew that well, and was braced for it, even eager.... | |
| 328 | Well, you have a good start. Admitting that you don't know something is the first step to learning.... Every day, I amaze myself with all I don't know. | |
| 329 | What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. | |
| 330 | What is government but theft by consent? You'll be moving in a society of kindred spirits. | |
| 331 | What is more frightening? The danger you already dread, or the trick the universe hasn't pulled on you yet? The one to make all prior concerns seem moot. | |
| 332 | Whatever you want to call it, {+ bullshit} can be defined as:
Communications where reality and truthfulness aren’t nearly as vital as the ability to manipulate the audience to get it to do whatever one wants done. | |
| 333 | When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. | |
| 334 | When it comes to faith, what men fear most is the truth they already know in their heart, yet deny. | |
| 335 | When you are willing to meekly sacrifice your ultimate value, your life, the only one you will ever have, to any thug who on a whim decides to take it from you, then you can't be helped. You may be able to be rescued for one day, but the next day another will come and you will again willingly prostrate yourself before him. You have placed the value of the life of your killer above your own. | |
| 336 | When you grant to anyone who demands it the right of life or death over you, you have already become a willing slave in search of any butcher who will have you. | |
| 337 | When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it.... Goes double for the ones you tell yourself. | |
| 338 | When you won, it was always better to win quickly and with extreme advantage. | |
| 339 | When you're as old as I am... you'll realize that governments don't know what they can't do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction. | |
| 340 | Whenever equality is imposed as an absolute, it is always equalized at the least common denominator, and historically, the least common denominator of mankind has been quite low indeed. | |
| 341 | Who is John Gault? | |
| 342 | Why? Why do the authorities allow the criminal gangs that terrorize neighborhoods and entire cities to thrive as they do? Politicians, attorneys general, district attorneys, and the FBI have the power to destroy the gangs and prevent most of the crimes they commit, the murdering and raping and human trafficking and the endless flood of drugs across the border, the hateful murdering murdering murdering of faithful husbands and little girls in their Sunday dresses. Yet the people with the power to stop men like Hamal and Lupo and Parker often facilitate their activities. Maybe the majority of politicians and their appointees are corrupt, but not all. Are those uncorrupted individuals so often ineffective because they are cowards or lazy or stupid? Does loyalty to party, class, club, or ideology matter to them more than doing what is right? Why? Why can't such people see that the crime and anarchy they permit to flourish in poor and middle-class neighborhoods will eventually metastasize into the enclaves of the elite where they live their privileged lives? Why do they have contempt for those not in their circle? Why can't they see that being of the people rather than ruling over them is the only way that they themselves will survive? | |
| 343 | Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self. | |
| 344 | Wizard’s Sixth Rule: the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason. | |
| 345 | Wizard's Fifth Rule: Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie. | |
| 346 | Women often seemed to leave things unsaid, and in his limited experience it was what they did not say that proved the most trouble. | |
| 347 | Would the young folk so test those to whose words they hearken. We should always question authority before we accept it. | |
| 348 | Yes, somehow a large chunk of the church has embraced a feckless faith, lead by a cardigan wearing Nancy boy Jesus and have contented themselves with being tolerant doormats for dillweeds with dense ideas. | |
| 349 | You acted like children fighting over a cake. You had a chance to share it, but instead chose to try to steal it all from your smaller siblings. If you come to my table, you will have to mind your manners, but you each will have bread. | |
| 350 | You can never know everything,... and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway. | |