It's always galling to be taught good manners by an enemy.

War is an admission of failure.

When you come to rely on the written word, it's time to light the fire with it.

No city, however massively fortified, is impregnable to a mule carrying chests of gold coins.

My father always told me that what's wrong with lying is that it's an admission of weakness. If you're the strongest, you can afford to tell the truth.

I tend to regard the whole human race as just a lot of different subspecies of pest.

The easiest way to do something is properly.

If the world is a book, are you the hero, or just a walk-on part?

In politics, it's what isn't said that matters.

Wars grew and mutated, finding ways to stay alive; they hung on with the grim tenacity of a weed growing in a crack in a wall, feeding on whatever nutrients their roots and tendrils could find.

The hunter never hates his quarry; it's a thing which he wants to get, to reduce into possession, so how could he hate it?

To value anything is to give it an unacceptable degree of power over you.

All the slaves of duty dig their own graves sooner or later.

Every breath and heartbeat is an act of prevarication, a prising open of options.

Faith comes in different tempers: there's the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can't cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.

Basic fact of life: no matter how far you run, you always take yourself with you.

Be specially polite to people who annoy you. True feelings are for true friends.

I think love and hate are really the same thing. They're what you feel when someone matters more to you than anything else; more than yourself, even.

A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing.

A man gathers a life around him like a hedgehog collecting leaves on its spines; what sticks to you defines you, and without them you're bare, defenseless, a yolk without a shell.

Hope is really just a variety of fear, all the more painful because it twitches a chance of escape in front of your nose as it slides by.

Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied.

A living animal is a pig, a cow, a sheep or a deer, but a dead one is pork, beef, mutton, venison; the two are so completely different that the same word can no longer be applied.

He who has his enemy's love and trust is in a far better position to attack, later, when the time is right.

A lie ... is often the mirror image of the truth; by examining it carefully, you can reconstruct the fact that lie was designed to conceal.

Pleasure is something you can easily lose the knack of, if you allow yourself to get out of practice.

I always think luck's a bit like splitting a log. You're much more likely to succeed if you read the grain and look for flaw-lines.

Every step away from chaos toward perfection accrues merit, no matter what the context, and the line between them is straight.

The pain of love is how slowly it dies.

Maybe that was what genius was: the knack of seeing the obvious through its obscure curtain of irrelevancies.

Words were too clumsy, sometimes; treacherous, too, always trying to twist around and mean something slightly different.

The cure for death is not being born.

Gods must be seen to be omnipotent, or the sky will fall.

It was easy to forget how perilously fine was the line between normality and aberration. How simple and straightforward life would be if all the deviants were wild-eyed, unkempt and slobbering, and all the honest men upright and clean-shaven.

It's always harder to find a satisfactory answer to a problem when you already know the right answer but aren't allowed to use it.

Duty is obligation, the bastard child of loyalty and the will to serve; when you think about it, just another roundabout way of saying love. No wonder it causes so much pointless damage.

He wondered how anybody could possibly choose to die; such a strange choice to make, the prey failing its obligation to evade the hounds for as long as possible.

Love is the most destructive weapon of all, the only problem being how to contain and channel it into something that can be spanned, aimed and loosed.

Love is a confidence trick, that's all. It's Nature's way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long, vulnerable gestation period into reproducing. Humans can think, so ordinary animal-grade maternal instinct wouldn't be enough to make human women go through all that, not if they stopped and thought about what's involved. So you have love. It's a substitute for rational thought.

What a wonderful magic politics is ... it can recognize the truth and still override it, providing you can get a consensus among the people who matter.

Trying to understand people is like trying to catch flies in a net; just when you think you've got them and you pounce, they flit out through the holes in the mesh and leave you feeling baffled and stupid.

To hunt successfully, you must know your ground, your pack and your quarry.

A head on a pike is worth two in the bush.

Loyalty's a wonderful thing, but any virtue taken to excess turns into stupidity in the end.

It doesn't matter if your ignorant so long as you can find people to know stuff for you.

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