Cage of Souls

For that, I thank him. A vast and worthless education is the greatest gift a child can have.

It is easy for a comfortable, free man to cry at the fall of every little bird. A prisoner in fear of his life has precious little regret to spare for anyone else.

Shadrapar has no purpose, no function. It exists for itself only, its own downward spiral to oblivion. It exists only to imprison the minds of those who dwell within it, so that their world shrinks until it holds nothing but their own desires, and they fight to stop you showing what’s beyond the bars. So I called it the cage of souls, so they would understand.

One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.

It is a great lie of civilisation that the things we invest with our emotions are real and important, but they are not. Take away the people and they vanish into smoke. All those idle dreams: government, money, education, love, revenge. All these things are parasites that cannot survive without the host.

We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.

Lawful authority was all, and moral authority merely its shadow, to be forced into whatever shape the law adopted.

We know the drudgery of being surrounded by all that unceasing banality.

life is made of patterns that repeat themselves,

Sitting in that cell with him as he wheezed his last hours away, I could feel my presence eroding, the desert wind smoothing over all the footprints I had ever made.

I was also unsure that once a man has raised the mob (for there is really only one mob, waiting in potentia to be raised) whether anyone can keep it from the barbaric acts of violence it strains for.

I could not imagine it, but that silence was shouting at us, telling us in no uncertain terms that we had not come home after all. Home was a place we would never know again; all there was of Shadrapar was what we carried with us. The cage of souls was empty, and all the souls had flown free

The haven of the dispossessed, the lower frontier of human knowledge, had been swept away at the cost of countless lives for the sake of some rich man's lie

Even the simplest plans go wrong, especially when put together by the simplest people.

When surrounded by ignorance, the educated man can get away with anything.

War,” said Sergei, “is just capitalism by other means.

What about saving the world?” Peter asked. “I’ve given up on philanthropy.

still had that child-part of me that insisted that, if I ignored something, then it would go away. It was a tactic that seldom worked with imaginary horrors, let alone real ones.

Now I think about it, most of the serious mistakes in my life come from taking a stand. One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.

I’m supposed to eat a dead animal?” I demanded. In Shadrapar we ate what we grew in the ground. Raising animals for food was a disgusting process abandoned in ancient times. The idea of consuming the flesh of another creature was vile and turned my stomach.

A prisoner in fear of his life has precious little regret to spare for anyone else.

For the stars are very far away, and however fast our machines carried us, it was not fast enough. The gaps between stars are so great that nothing can cross them quickly, not even light, which is fastest of all. We never found a way to skip between the stars, to meet the people we were sure awaited us there. That broke the back of our optimism. The spirit of man was crushed by the distances between the stars.

When even the lowliest guard has full power of life or death over you, you find that higher grades of authority lose their sting.

blind and deaf by its own hand, ruthless to those who tell it the truth.

the book fell like a stone into the utter silence of people just not caring.

you set out to change things, the things you want to change push back.

everyone told stories of the past and reinvented history to suit them.

Living in a cage teaches you helplessness.