“Dalinar forced himself to be calm. "Roion, we cannot continue to treat this war as a game.""All wars are games. The greatest kind, with the pieces lost real lives, the prizes captured making for real wealth! This is the life for which men exist. To fight, to kill, to win.”

“Life to me is the greatest of all games. The dangerlies in treating it as a trivial game, a gameto be taken lightly, and a game in which therules don’t matter much. The rules matter agreat deal. The game has to be played fairly orit is no game at all. And even to win the gameis not the chief end. The chief end is to win ithonorably and splendidly.”

“To me it was real war and my life was at stake, and I believe that all those clandestine spy games we played as children helped when the Occupation came.”

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”

“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

“Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.”