Quotes from Joel Shepherd

The tavalai were always hard to hate. Some managed it, but those were always the people with too much emotion and not enough brains. Officers like that are dangerous, they got their people killed. I didn't want to be like them.

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When civilisation declined, it was the women who always suffered most.

You stop asking questions, and you just... accept some smaller version of things. Of the truth.

Relying on the praise of others could become a habit, and those in the habit would seek that praise like an addict and his drug. Strength came through self-belief, and the belief of others without belief in yourself was useless. Chalk was still chalk, even surrounded by granite.

Perfection of the system is not a prerequisite for loyalty," Ramoja said sharply. "If it were, neither of us would choose the jobs we hold. If the system is flawed, then fixing it is merely another part of the job. Our loyalty comes from our commitment to the values that underpin the system, not the system itself.

They want things to be fair," said Trace. "There's no such thing as fair. Attempts to impose fairness upon an unfair universe usually end in disaster.

All existence is in conflict. We fight the elements, we fight our consciences, we fight the limitations and eventual mortality of our bodies. All things happen by conflict, of one sort or another.

My mother told me once that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Never sure, Lisbeth," said Styx, backing away to consider her work. "Certainty is a sign of inferior intellect.

Every rock-face tells a story, every valley hides a secret. You can see time itself shaped in these rocks, if you look.

People are individuals, not groups. We either live together as such, or we abandon any hope of civilisation.

It's like a letter-writing society. They approach it like poetry. Not all of it is rebellious, some of it is quite beautiful. Just art, from kids who live in a world where they'll likely never see art. At least not officially.

He had a smart crew, and if he spoke too much, they'd shut up and listen to him instead of volunteering their own

There are always those prepared to sacrifice civilised principles for personal gain,

The croma word for school means 'tree'," said Kim'ju. "Some croma scholars think it comes from the parren thought of House Enquiry. Enquiry took over much of the croma education system, divided as it was back then, during the croma-parren union.

Intelligence and feeling are two different things.

If the cause is big enough, people will justify dishonour.

There is an old joke the chah'nas used to say; they said that among friends, a trouble shared is a trouble halved… but that among tavalai, a trouble shared is a trouble multiplied, retold, translated into five hundred tongues and turned into opera.

Certainty is a sign of inferior intellect.

They were the progressives, the freethinkers, the radicals of their day. History favoured such people. They had brought great change, and great innovation, and the present was all the greater for their inspiration. But now, Ibrahim believed, the pendulum had swung too far. The Great Cause had become merely an ideology, and ideology, Ibrahim knew only too well, was the antithesis of reason.

She was theirs, in body if not in spirit. And yet she had abandoned them, after they had abandoned her. They valued what Kresnov was, but they did not value her. Nor did they value the others of her kind, her friends among them.

In times of conflict, everyone retreated to their most tribal positions.

It was the Cause. In the face of a Great Cause, the individual was always the first to suffer. The Great Cause consumed individuals as a Southern Plains tornado consumed trees. It did not matter that the Cause was in the name of humanity itself—any such mass ideology, even that conducted in the name of individual rights and freedoms, would sacrifice anyone and anything to further its own grand purpose.