Random Book Quotes

Magic was hard and tricky and demanding, and it went wrong more often than not, but it was interesting, too, like solving a constantly changing jigsaw puzzle.

The possibility of anthropomorphizing animals’ behavior is a great source of concern for all comparative psychology and ethology, whose experts generally take great care not to attribute to animals more than is strictly necessary to explain their behavior—and especially nothing that is not supported by empirical evidence. Thus, rather than speaking of animal morality, they refer to their “prosociality”; instead of attributing language to them, they attribute “communication”; rather than postulate friendship, scientists talk of “affiliative relationships.” This way, scientists protect their disciplines from our almost inevitable tendency to interpret all animal behavior in human terms.

“But consequences don’t have to mean death. Sometimes the harder path is letting someone live with what they’ve done and making them work to become better. Death is easy. It’s final. It solves the immediate problem but doesn’t leave room for growth.”

In a way, the ability to show restraint was the greatest show of power. It meant you were so overwhelmingly more powerful than your opponents that you could dictate their life and death with no risk to yourself.

“Cover me in shit, tar and feather me, that doesn’t change a thing. A man’s dignity is in his actions. Getting down on my knees and kissing the boot of that spineless worm—that’s how I’d throw away my dignity.”

“We place such a crushing burden on knights,” I said. “We tell them they’re supposed to be heroes, defenders of the realm, people of superior character. Then we send them into a slaughter and force them to butcher. They experience fear. They exist in constant vigilance, always ready to fight for their lives. It exhausts their body and soul. They watch their friends bleed out and die, and they have no time to grieve. Nobody warns them about this. Nobody sings songs about a young man trying to push his guts back into his stomach, or being so scared that the world turns dark, or being knocked off your horse and drowning in a muddy field in heavy armor while riders stomp on your back.”

War wasn’t like the stories made it seem: all dramatic speeches and glorious battles. Mostly it was just ordinary people doing violent things because their leaders had decided it was necessary.

And he had learned another lesson: wealth, like power, needed protection. A true businessman was a guardian who should be prepared to defend what he built.

The end of humanity doesn't erase the fact of our existence, any more than this last chapter erases this whole book, any more than a period erases a sentence.

We could thus be accused of applying a double standard. In the case of human children, we admit a gradation. In the case of animals, we assert: either they have a concept of death equivalent to the average adult human’s or they lack a concept of death. All or nothing, yes or no, black or white, pizza with pineapple or sanity.

Even if I knew something dreadful was on the horizon and tried to hide in the smallest of nooks, fate would still find me. We all carried our destinies, like heavy invisible luggage, and no amount of running could keep it at bay forever.

“I wonder how much of a person is simply fabricated by others,” she said. “And think about this: None of us see the same person in the exact same way. We bring ourselves into the equation. So an individual is never really an individual.”

“Without proper procedures, the court would devolve into arbitrary enforcement based on individual enforcers’ preferences. The bureaucracy ensures fairness.”

Still, if animals do have the capability to communicate with us with at least some sense of agency and intention, then we are surely obliged to facilitate that.

You might be shocked by how much a little dollop of butter can smooth everything out and amplify flavors. When I was in culinary school, someone asked how much butter to add to a sauce and the chef shrugged and said “up to a half cup,” which is an entire stick, so don’t ever feel bad about liberal butter usage. Adding a little butter to a sauce or saucy dish to finish it, by the way, is a French technique called monter au beurre, so actually when you put butter on noodles, rice, oatmeal, or vegetables you are being a chef.

Looking at history through any single lens creates distortions, because history is too complex for any one way of looking to suffice.

The truth was, even the lofty required validation from the masses they deemed beneath them.