“No job security,” Denth said, leaning back in his chair. “The kinds of things we do, they tend to be dangerous and unpredictable. Our employers have a habit of dying off on us.” “Though usually not from the chills,” Tonk Fah noted. “Swords tend to be the method of choice.”

“In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.”

“We tend to have things a little bit easier than girls. And we tend to assume therefore that the world was built for us, and that we’re, you know, the culmination of everything that came before us. And then we get told that having a little bit of this attitude is called balls, and that balls are good, and we kind of take it from there”

“Sometimes when things get hard, we tend to set our sights on what's hard, that difficult thing that keeps us upset, and we turn our back on our strengths. ”

“One of the best and most efficacious methods for dealing with such a State, is for the Prince who acquires it to go and dwell there in person, since this will tend to make his tenure more secure and lasting.”

“We tend to think of dangers and uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life, or irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world. I suggest the contrary: that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life. In fact, as we shall come to understand, they make life matter. They define what it means to be human.”