The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason.  The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is.  From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built.  This is the foundation from which life is embraced.  Reason is a choice.  Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them.  Reason is our only way of grasping reality - it's our basic tool of survival.  We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.

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.

A leader cannot follow behind people, tail between his legs, sniffing for their momentary whims and wishes, whining to follow them this way and that as they ramble through life.  Those kind of people are not looking for a leader - they are looking for a master, and one will find them.  A true leader forges a clear path through a moral wilderness so that people might see the way.

The truth of a situation most often turns out to be that one with the simplest explanation.

If an idea was sound, it had to have a life beyond a leader, or the leader had failed.

Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be.

...the first law of reason is that what exists, exists; what is, is, and that from this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. He said that was the foundation from which life is embraced.

Wizard’s Sixth Rule: the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.

Life is precious.  That's why sacrifice for freedom is rational: it is for life itself and your ability to live it that you act, since life without freedom is the slow, sure death of self-sacrifice to the 'good' of mankind - who is always someone else.  Mankind is just a collection of individuals.  Why should everyone's life be more important, more precious, more valuable than yours?  Mindless mandatory self-sacrifice is insane.

'Profit' is a dirty word only to the leeches of the world.  They want it seen as evil, so they can more easily snatch what they did not earn.

His face might have been fresh, but his ideas were not; tyranny was ancient, even if Neal deluded himself in believing it the bright new salvation of mankind when applied by him and his fellows.

Good.  Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.

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.

She understood, now, why life had seemed so empty, so pointless: she herself had rendered it so in refusing to think.  Nicci had been a slave to everyone of need.  She had given her masters their only real weapon against her; she had surrendered to their twisted lies by putting the crippling chains of guilt around her own neck for them, giving herself freely into slavery to the whims and wishes of others instead of living her life as she should have - for herself.  She had never asked why it was right for her to be a slave to another’s desires, but not evil for them to enslave her.  She was not contributing to the betterment of mankind, but was merely a servant to countless puling little tyrants.  Evil was not one large entity, but a ceaseless torrent of small wrongs left unchallenged, until they festered into monsters.

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.

One of the things that defines our character is how we handle our mistakes.

Does death invalidate life?  No, it defines it, and in so doing creates its value.

Still, every person had to make choices for themselves.  Those who lost sight of the values fought for and won in the past usually came to lose those values, leaving subsequent generations to have to fight to win them back, only for them to be squandered by their heirs, who didn’t have to face the struggle to gain them.

Everyone, to one extent or another, must face life’s trials. There will always be those who try to influence or even dominate us. We cannot allow such things to be an excuse for making the wrong choices. Ultimately, each of us lives our own life and we are responsible for it.

In a manner of speaking you hide behind women's skirts as you shoot arrows so that when arrows come back at you, you can feign outrage at an atrocity.

Mercy is a contingency plan devised by the guilty in the eventuality that they are caught.  Justice is the domain of the just.  This is about justice.

If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking for others to do for you.  They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself.  They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price.  Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.

You must find within yourself the ability to help yourself, the free will to accomplish what you must.  Only in that way can you truly succeed in life.

The man I fear most is the one who preaches virtue and a better life while using people's good intentions to shade their eyes from the light of truth.

From what I've seen in life, a man who preaches a better way at the cost of the truth is a man who wants nothing more than for himself to be the master and you the slave.

Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.

You don't have any idea what love really is.  You can't love anyone or anything until you love your own existence, first.  Love can only grow out of a respect for your own life.  When you love yourself, your own existence, then you love someone who can enhance your existence, share it with you, and make it more pleasurable.  When you hate yourself and believe your existence is evil, then you can only hate, you can only experience the shell of love, that longing for something good, but you have nothing to base it in but hatred.  You taint the very concept of love... with your corrupted longing for it.  You want me only to justify your hatred, to be your partner in self-loathing.  To truly love someone...,  you must revel in their existence because they make life all the more wonderful.  If you think existence is corrupt, then you are sealed off from the fruition of such a relationship, from what love really is.

Life is the future, not the past.  The past can teach us, through experience, how to accomplish things in the future, comfort us with cherished memories, and provide the foundation of what has already been accomplished.  But only the future holds life.  To live in the past is to embrace what is dead.  To live life to its fullest, each day must be created anew.  As rational, thinking beings, we must use our intellect, not a blind devotion to what has come before, to make rational choices.

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.

Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self.

After all, I don't need to threaten you to get you to see that the water in that fountain is wet or that the walls of this room are constructed from stone, but the Order must threaten people to make them believe that an eternity of being dead will be an eternal delight, but only if they do as they're told in this life.

People who hate don't usually recognize that vile taint within themselves.  They spew their hatred as righteous.  That corruption is what makes them so evil - and so dangerous.  They are able to do the most despicable things and think themselves heroes for having done them.

If you think you're a slave, then you are a slave...

Once liberty was surrendered to tyranny, it could be smothered for centuries before its flames again sprang to life and brightened the world.

Hope is not a strategy.

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.

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.

Only you can achieve self-worth for yourself. Any group offering it to you, or demanding it of you, comes bearing chains of slavery.

Evil grants no mercy, and to attempt to appease it is nothing more than a piecemeal surrender to it.  Surrender to evil is slavery at best, death at worst.  Thus, your unconditional rejection of violence is really nothing more than embracing death as preferable to life.  You will achieve what you embrace.

If you are unwilling to defend your right to your own lives, then you are merely like mice trying to argue with owls.  You think their ways are wrong.  They think you are dinner.

Generosity is fine, if it's by your free choice, but a belief in the primacy of self-sacrifice as a moral requisite is nothing less than the sanctioning of slavery.  Those who tell you that it is your responsibility and duty to sacrifice are trying to blind you to the chains they are slipping around your neck.

There is no greater value than life - and that's what you partially recognize by your confused notion of granting mercy.  Their conscious, deliberate act of murder takes the irreplaceable value of life from another.  A murderer, by his own choice to kill, forfeits the right to his own life.  Mercy for such evil is nothing short of excusing it and thus allowing evil to prevail - it codifies the taking of innocent life by not making the murderer forfeit their own guilty life.

In trade between willing parties who share moral values and who deal fairly and honestly with one another, compromise over something like price is legitimate.  In matters of morality or truth, there can be no compromise.

Freedom must be won, but then it has to be guarded...

Deserve Victory.

He didn't even understand why there needed to be new laws all the time.  After all, right was right, and wrong was wrong.

Teresa had skirmished much of her adult life among the cut-and-thrust front lines of female social structure, where words were wielded as weapons meant to draw blood.  The higher the level of engagement, the more refined the edge.  There, you had to be adept to know you had been cut and were bleeding, or the wound was all that much greater for others seeing it and you missing it, thus.

Wizard's Fifth Rule: Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.

Like hounds at a feast, people gather round the table of tyranny, eager for tasty scraps tossed on the floor.  Not everyone will wag their tail for a tyrant, but most will, if he first makes them salivate with hate and gives license to their covetous impulses by making them feel it is only their due.  Many would rather take than earn.  Tyrants make the envious comfortable with their greed.

Culture carries no privilege to exist.  Cultures do not have value simply because they are.  Some cultures, the world is better off without.

...if the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.

Before the crowds who gathered to hear his words, the Minister had called for new measures - unspecified - to deal with violence.  Such measures were always unspecified and only rarely was any real action taken.  The mere impassioned plea was all that was required to convince the people the Minister was decisive and effective.  Perception was the goal and all that really mattered.  Perception was easily accomplished, required little effort, and it never had to stand the test of reality.

Dalton knew how easily the minds of the people could be manipulated with the right words, especially if people were distracted by other matters and confused with contradictions.

...knowledge is dangerous to oppressors.  To those who would dominate you, knowledge must be crushed, because people who understand are people who will stand against the unfairness of the elite.

Truth didn't wear a tongue smooth; lies did.

I can never fully believe or trust you... not after the lies you have told.  That is the curse of lying.....  Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time.

It is said that the greatest cruelty is drawn from those with the kindest hearts.

The Wizard's Fourth Rule, he called it.  He said that there was magic in forgiveness, in the Fourth Rule.  Magic to heal.  In the forgiveness you grant, and more so in the forgiveness you receive.

Nothing gained without cost is valued.  I was reminded of that fact only today.  She was the one we buried.  Freedom has a cost, and all will bear it, so that all will value and preserve it.

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.

'Never let a beautiful woman pick your path for you when there be a man in her line of sight.'

It seemed that there was no one more glad for peace than those whose job it was to fight for it.

But here there is fire, to warm the people who tell me we are all equal now, how there will no longer be some put before others and I must therefore not be allowed to keep what is mine.  Isn't it odd, that the people who tell me how we are to all be the same under the alliance with Darken Rahl and do no work other than to divide up the fruit of my labors, are all well fed, and warm, and have fine clothes on their backs.  But my family goes hungry and cold.