Matt

“Yes, people had always been evil nearly as much as they had been good. Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering - that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest.
But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with an appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.
Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary.
Falcrest had chosen empire.
Falcrest could therefore be held responsible for its choice.
Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptance they had allowed those devourings to continue.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“I’m not the kind of immortal who never dies, Baru. Just the kind who lives forever.”
― Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

“Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate