There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.
Why was this bloody world created?" "As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever." " [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative.
but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.
Chez les Tigres noirs du Sri Lanka on entrainait les femmes combatantes qui n'étaient pas vierges à passer une journée avec une grenade dans le vagin. (ch. 2)
War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing.
You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic - especially toward the Fourth of July.
Sex without love is like a goddamn business transaction. And sometimes both parties feel as if they got a good deal, but that doesn't make it any less so.
A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.
A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.
He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.
Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow-creatures.
In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connexion with the event itself.
At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.
But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.
It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals...
If the afterlife really is a big war,” Kaladin said, “then I hope I end up in Damnation. At least there I might be able to get a wink or two of sleep.
Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
I wish I could grow swords like I can roses. Wouldn’t war be so romantic then? Then the U.S. could really show the world how much it loves it.
