For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.

To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.

It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.

learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn't wrong. Or right. It's just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That's all.

To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?