Dio

“Even small actions have consequences. And while we can often choose our actions, we rarely get to choose our consequences.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Cid Arthur found more than poverty when he escaped his father's palace. He found sickness, too. As did I. The Gray Rot had been on Emesh for some years, brought by some unscrupulous trader from off world. The natives had no immunity, and the animalcule chewed through like paper and festered in the street. I was palatine. I was immune, Mother Earth have mercy on me.
Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to sit in the belly of an epidemic, untouched by it? I felt like a ghost. My body's almost-alien biochemistry--the legacy of tens of generations and of millions of Imperials marks worth of genetic recombination--preserved me from every weeping sore, every bout of necrosis, every bleeding cough. It sounds like a blessing. It is no blessing to watch other men die, even less to watch the ones you love waste away. When I started this account, I thought to skip this part, so painful was my loss of Cat. But I was wrong. She matters. She must matter.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“What tyrant first dreamed of conquest and clad violent oppression in terms of virtue? Why does the imposition of one will over another draw men like no other sin? For more than two hundred years, the Emperor has demanded that the galaxy align itself to his principles at the cost of ten thousand cultures that lived free and without the need for tyranny. Now Horus demands that the stellar nations of this broken empire dance to his tune instead. Billions die for conquest, to advance the pride of these two vain creatures cast in the shapes of men.
There is no virtue in fighting for conquest. Nothing is more worthless and hollow than obliterating freedom for the sake of more land, more coin, more voices singing your name in holy hymn. Conquest is as meaningless as glory. Worse, it is an evil in its selfishness. Both are triumphs only in a fool's crusade.”
― Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Lord of the Red Sands

“Often I had observed my father in this mode, didactic and imperious. His eyes--my eyes--never settled in any one place or on one face but drifted over all that surrounds him. His basso voice carried far, resonating in the chest rather than in the ear. He had an air about him, a cold magnetism that bent all who listened to his will. In another age, in a smaller universe, he might have been Caesar. But our Empire had an abundance of Caesars. We bred them, and so he was doomed to suffer Caesars greater still.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence