Selva

“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power – you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labour or war.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant

“I rolled my eyes at Kest. We'd heard this lecture many times before, but Trin hadn't, so she stepped right into it.
"Is it really so hard?" She asked
"My dear, not one man in a hundred can be a proper archer. And not one in ten thousand can become a master."
"And you are one? A master archer, i mean?"
Brasti smiled and contemplated the nails of his right hand. "One might fairly say so, i believe."
"One says so frequently," I observed.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Traitor's Blade

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“The measure of a man is what he does when he has power.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising