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

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.

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

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.

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.

Wenn [der Lehrer] wirklich weise ist, fordert er euch nicht auf, ins Haus seiner Weisheit einzutreten, sondern führt euch an die Schwelle eures eigenen Geistes.

If anything in nature was as beautiful as it was deadly, it was she.

My accent depends on whom I'm around.

She has been hanging on to the hope of him for so long that she doesn't realize there isn't anything left to hope for.

Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living.

To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.

You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.

The use of soul-force for turning stones into bread would have been considered, as it is still considered, as black magic.

In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.

A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought.