Quotes from K.J. Parker

There is no absolute right or wrong, good or evil, but there are good manners and common decency.

Remarkable how often there's a good reason that masks the real reason.

Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it's just you and you know you're basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?

Partly, he said, he enjoyed my company; it wasn't often that he had a chance to talk to someone whose mind was so little cluttered with education or accepted opinions— ("You mean I'm stupid." "Good heavens, no. Just ignorant.")

A quiet life," Stheno replied. "You wouldn't think it was a lot to ask.

There's an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it's a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm's way.

Obviously, there's no way of making money that doesn't hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn't generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn't function if that were the case.

in an ideal world, you'd be able to pick beef puddings from a beef pudding tree.

My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I'm happier with things. I understand stuff like tensile strength, shearing force, ductility, work hardening, stress, fatigue. I know the same sort of things happen with people, but the rules are subtly different. And nobody's ever paid for my time to get to know about people

It's sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love because everybody dies but the love they cause to be in others doesn't die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow therefore love is the greatest evil.

To try and rationalise all this in terms of right, wrong, good, evil, is just naive; the very worst things we do, after all, we do for love, and the very worst pain we feel comes from love. She was right about that. In my opinion, love is the greatest and most enduring enemy, because love gives rise to the memories that kill us, slowly, every day. I think a man who never encounters love might quite possibly live forever. He'd have to, because if he died, who the hell would ever remember him?

It slowly dawned on me that it's possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can't figure out the politics, or they think it'll be horrendously unpopular, or it'll cost too much money,

But how do we know it's really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn't mean I was telling the truth.

Most wars start because someone makes a mistake, and most battles are lost by the losing side rather than won by the victors. I'm not sure if that makes things better or worse. I suppose it depends on which you disapprove of more, malice or stupidity.

Take the truly dreadful, evil men of history, slaughterers of nations in the name of some twisted ideal. Of necessity you must allow them to have had Faith (which moves mountains, and without which mere works are in vain) and Hope, Loyalty, and Self-Sacrifice in the Name of the Cause, and practically every other noble and glorious characteristic you can possibly think of, except for the small matter of being in the right. . .

Ah". Tzimisces smiled. "Let me guess. Flowery periphrases, back-to-back literary allusions and quotations from thousand-year-old authors. A marked reluctance to use one word when twelve can be jammed in if you sit on the lid.

It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference.

When you get to my age, you'll find it's fatally easy to forget to hate all your enemies all the time; and once you've slipped up and not hated one of them, it makes it almost impossibly hard to hate the rest of them.

You can lead the people to water, but you can't make them think. Nobody, it seems, can do that.

The fact is, the more you look for something, the likelier you are to find it, even if it isn't actually there; Sooner or later, if you look hard enough, you'll find something. The trick is then to interpret what you've found as what you were looking for.

And with every massive success you notch up, you ask for and get more money, not because you want it to buy things with but because it's the only reliable way in this business of keeping score. If you're getting x every night but your best friend and deadliest rival is getting x+1, it's enough to break your heart. So you try harder, and harder still.

Everyone keeps telling me what I can't do, but they're wrong. The only thing I can't do is nothing.

I know she comes across as annoying to begin with," he said. "But once you've got to know her a bit better, you'll find it makes no difference whatsoever.

Of course, I never beat Ogus at anything, unless I cheated. Which I did, whenever I could. I figure, winning is winning. Cheating is just one of many ways of prevailing; just happens to be the way I'm best at.