Quotes
What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!
...after all he is only a man, that is to say capable of little and of much, of all and of nothing; he is neither angel nor brute, but man.
Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.
There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, that beast stirs.
Imagine if every species named itself after its greatest flaw. We could name our species arrogance.
p. 288
Rationality is not one of humanity’s strong points.
p. 88
Only the creatures of the earth take from one another, boy. All creatures, but men more than any. Life they take, and liberty, and all that another man may have—sometimes through greed, sometimes through stupidity, but never by any volition but their own. Beware your own race, Bran Davies—they are the only ones who will ever harm you, in the end.
p. 71
“You have heard me talk of Logres. It was the old name for this country, thousands of years ago; in the old days when the struggle between good and evil was more bitter and open than it is now. That struggle goes on all round us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will,” he added softly to himself, “for there is something of each in every man.”
p. 74
He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable—a routine miracle.
p. 14
“In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.”
“What’s that?” asked Nimrod.
“Being able to understand him completely.”
p. 76
When we study history we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.
Man is biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definite reality. Its limits are set by nature, but, once constructed, this world acts back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.
p. 183
