Last Argument of Kings (The First Law Trilogy Book 3)

Probably there was heroism going on down there in the smoke. Soldiers hauling injured comrades to safety through the sooty darkness. Nurses stitching wounds by screaming candlelight. Townsfolk plunging into burning buildings to drag out coughing children. Heroism of an everyday and unglamorous kind. A kind that made no difference to the overall out

A man who’d done nothing in all his life but evil. And all the while he’d looked at the sky and shrugged his shoulders. Blamed whoever was nearest, and told himself he’d had no choices.

anyone in a position of high authority ever really knew what they were doing. The best one could hope for was to maintain some shred of an illusion that one might. And occasionally, perhaps, try to give the mindless flood of events the slightest push in one direction or another, hoping desperately that it would turn out to be the right one.

Ninefingers was talking of himself, of course, as everyone always does, given the chance.

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?

It can be a terrible curse for a man to get everything he ever dreamed of. If the shining prizes turn out somehow to be empty baubles, he is left without even his dreams for comfort.

People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

Do you know what’s worse than a villain? A villain who thinks he’s a hero. A man like that, there’s nothing he won’t do, and he’ll always find himself an excuse.