“Men in power always pretend things like virtue, or divine guidance, some kind of mandate to ‘protect’ the… — Brandon Sanderson
“Men in power always pretend things like virtue, or divine guidance, some kind of mandate to ‘protect’ the rest of us. If we believe that the Almighty put them were they are, it’s easier for us to swallow what they do to us.”
p. 832Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
“And so,” he said, “in the end, what must we determine? Is it the intellect of a genius that we revere? If it were their artistry, the beauty of their mind, would we not laud it regardless of whether we’d seen their product before?
“But we don’t. Given two works of artistic majesty, otherwise weighted equally, we will give greater acclaim to the one who did it first. It doesn’t matter what you create. It matters what you create before anyone else.
“So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect. It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself. The greatest talent that we think a man can have?” He plucked one final string. “Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.”
p. 1000
People see in stories what they’re looking for.
p. 807
That man’s so incompetent he might as well be fighting for the other side.
p. 667
