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| 51 | 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. | |
| 52 | Ah deserve.... The notion of deserved and undeserved is a fancy. Knowing both life and death, we endeavor to impose worth and meaning upon our deeds, and thereby to comfort our fear of impermanence. We choose to imagine that our lives merit continuance. Mayhap all sentience shares a similar fancy. Mayhap the Earth itself, being sentient in its fashion, shares it. Nonetheless it is a fancy. A wider gaze does not regard us in that wise. The stars do not. Perhaps the Creator does not. The larger truth is merely that all things end. By that measure, our fancies cannot be distinguished from dust. | |
| 53 | Ah, no, people like the idea of a flat universe because they find negatively curved space difficult to deal with. | |
| 54 | Airar went sick in the realization that war was no dainty sport he had been taught, but horror and pain and the death of friends. | |
| 55 | All men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Other, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves - they are the rules of Men... | |
| 56 | All our acts upon what we assume to be true..., what we assume to know. The connection is so strong, so thoughtless, that when those things we need to be true are threatened, we try to make them true with our acts. We condemn the innocent to make the guilty. We raise the wicked to make them holy. Like the mother who continues nursing her dead babe, we act out our refusal. | |
| 57 | All things are defined by names. Change the name, and you change the thing. Of course there is a lot more to it than that, but paracosmically that is what it boils down to.... | |
| 58 | Amazing. This thing is smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. | |
| 59 | Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world. They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. | |
| 60 | Among all the varied wonders of the universe, there's nothing so firmly clapped shut as the military mind. | |
| 61 | And he [Jesus] said to them [His disciples], 'But now, whoever has a money belt is to take it along, likewise also a bag, and whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one.
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| 62 | Answers are easy. It's asking the right questions which is hard. | |
| 63 | Any system that makes a man fear knowledge is an evil system. | |
| 64 | Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another. | |
| 65 | Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. | |
| 66 | As a general run, motives weren't hard to understand there on the frontier. Things were pretty cut and dried, and a body knew where he stood with folks. He knew what his problems were, and the problems of those about him were about the same. A man was too busy trying to stay alive and make some gain, to have time to think much about himself or get his feelings hurt.
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| 67 | As for happiness... I don’t think you can give that to anyone, if they don’t have it in them. However, it’s certainly possible to give unhappiness - as you are finding. | |
| 68 | As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It's not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination. | |
| 69 | As I was saying... why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side? | |
| 70 | As with women everywhere, those of Forebridge valued kindness; they were fond of it; but they did not surrender their virtue to it. They preferred heroes - or rogues. | |
| 71 | Authors are the only people who get in trouble if they steal from others and try to hide it, but get praised for stealing when they do it in the open. Remember that. It'll help you a lot in college. | |
| 72 | Aye, but by choice, not by coercion. When rightness rules by force, it doth cease to be right. | |
| 73 | Because the Middle Ages erred in one direction, does it follow that there is no error in the opposite direction? | |
| 74 | Because they were real illusions.... Be sure, children - illusions can do as much harm as anything else in this world. By clouding your perception of reality, illusions can kill. | |
| 75 | Because those most devious know the power of suggestion is more powerful than reality. Reality can be brutally disappointing, whereas there resides limitless possibility in mere suggestion. It is the driving force behind belief and faith. | |
| 76 | Because... it's the only way he can avoid massive guilt. Once he gave in to temptation, he became a convert to his own particular vice, with all the fanaticism of any convert. You might say he's acquired a vested interest in sin, and to disown it would be to ruin him. | |
| 77 | 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. | |
| 78 | Before you do anything rash, like pressing another button, may I offer an alternative suggestion? | |
| 79 | Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting... acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved. | |
| 80 | Black moleskin gloves covered his hands; the right because it was burned, the left because a man felt half a fool wearing only one glove. | |
| 81 | Blank people behind blank windows.... Faceless people wielding power without having to take the responsibility for the use of that power. Doing their daily work without knowing - probably without even caring - what the ultimate results of that work would be. It was why bureaucracies grew and flourished. | |
| 82 | Brigadier, a straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting. | |
| 83 | But he has the attitude, set in concrete, that virtue is measured by one's disaffection from the power structure under which one lives. Such a person builds a fortress of self-serving piety, resisting authority of any kind at every turn whether for good or ill. | |
| 84 | 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. | |
| 85 | But I like confusion. Too often we belittle it as a lesser Passion. But confusion leads a scholar to study further and push for secrets. No great discovery was ever made by a femalen or malen who was confident they knew everything. | |
| 86 | But it seems to me that some activists within the gay-rights movement are interested in something else. Special protection under the law is not good enough. They want to force you to change your way of thinking - twenty-first-century thought police. They want to attack religious beliefs that conflict with their own. | |
| 87 | But now he recalled Kuhn, asserting that scientists who used different paradigms existed in literally different worlds, epistemology being such an integral component of reality. Thus Aristoteleans simply did not see the Galilean pendulum, which to them was a body falling with some difficulty; and in general, scientists debating the relative merits of competing paradigms simply talked right through each other, using the same words to discuss different realities. | |
| 88 | But some things have to be done. It's better to do them, than to live with the fear of them. | |
| 89 | But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people's litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction. | |
| 90 | But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing. Sax had noticed this fact in his student years: that there were people who would score high on any intelligence test, and were very good at their work, but who at the same time could walk into a room of people and within an hour have many of the occupants of that room laughing at them, or even despising them. | |
| 91 | But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person. | |
| 92 | But weakness can imitate strength if bound properly, just as cowardice can imitate heroism if given nowhere to flee. | |
| 93 | But when it comes to boat drill I note that the crew acts as if it were for pay - no fooling! They know what to do in an emergency and will do it. | |
| 94 | But you don't get cheers by insulting your audience, nor return engagements either... | |
| 95 | But. Here we are, and here is always the place we must start from. Eh? | |
| 96 | By punishing all who speak against them in even the slightest way... If thou dost let the law prohibit certain words, then evil men will punish folk that they dislike, by claiming they did speak the words prohibited. | |
| 97 | Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery. | |
| 98 | Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation. | |
| 99 | Circular logic will only make you dizzy, Doctor. | |
| 100 | Common sense and primal instinct tell me that the bad guy should die and the good girl should live. Call me carnal. | |