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An army was the sort of thing everyone wanted to have, so long as it was off doing important things elsewhere.

I’d hoped…I’d hoped you could tell me, give me an absolute right. For once, I’d like my moral code not to come with a list of exceptions at the end.

“They all stretched farther and farther until they collapsed. In all the history of mankind, has any conqueror decided they had enough? Has any man just said, ‘This is good. This is what I wanted,’ and gone home?”

Morality is not a thing you can simply doff to put on the helm of battle, then put back on when you’re done with the slaughter.

“Power is a knife,” Wit said, taking his seat. “A terrible, dangerous knife that can’t be wielded without cutting yourself. We joked about stupidity, but in reality most people aren’t stupid. Many are simply frustrated at how little control they have over their lives. They lash out. Sometimes in spectacular ways…”

They were too theatrical—and there were too many of them—for all to be truly deranged. This was a fad. A way of dealing with unexpected events and giving some shape to lives that had been turned upside down.

That didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. A group of people all trying to impress one another was always more dangerous than the lone psychopath.

Politics is involved, Adolin—so by definition it can’t be easy.

But merely being tradition does not make some thing worthy, Kadash. We can’t just assume that because some thing is old it is right.

Curious, how quickly tyrants grow religious. It must that be convenient to tell yourself that your murders belong to the Almighty instead.

“But profiting off people’s emotions?”

“Pity can be a powerful tool. Anytime you can make someone else feel something, you’ve got power over them.”

“I have to protect him,” Kaladin whispered.

Why?

“If I protect …” He coughed. “If I protect…only the people I like, it means that I don’t care about doing what is right.” If he did that, he only cared about what was convenient for himself.

That wasn’t protecting. That was selfishness.

To age truly was to suffer the ultimate treason, that of one’s body against oneself.