And the first king was a lucky soldier.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

A fighter should not think only of his shete, just because he has a shete in his hand. Everything is a weapon in the warrior's mind.

Strange, isn't it, that it's always more difficult to talk people out of killing each other than into it?

The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that pricked at his eyes. Without that tapestry of colour and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.

A libertarian is someone who can believe that the police are no more than a gang of thugs without realizing that in the absence of police, thugs will gather into gangs.

Sometimes the harshest lessons were the most valuable.