Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.

If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?

It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.

When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.

Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.

Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.

She was an autocrat, didn't really believe in democracy. The benefit of her approach was that, if you work with twenty people and ask everybody's opinion, you would never achieve what she did.

The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.

When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed.

Knowledge is honestly everything. It's not just books and staying behind a desk and having a diploma. There's also traveling and knowledge about people, and what I do and scripts and books.

Politics is a jungle-torn between doing the right thing and staying in office.

Rejoicing is the essence of genuine worship. A sad face (apart from remorse for sin or regret concerning the pain of others) is an affront to a gracious and generous God.

As a young guy from south London, I wanted to be able to make myself stand out.