“Time means lives. Time means more chaos. We always think that time will resolve things, but it never has.”

“If we were given one word of information in our entire history, how we'd treasure it! how we'd pore over ever syllable, divining it's meaning, arguing its importance; how we'd examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet...we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day we'll die of voluntary ignorance ”

“The ambition of most beings is just to stay alive, overeat, spend too much, and avoid hard work. I’m happy that I can achieve much more than that…and we all die sooner or later. A death in service of a great ideal is a fine thing.”

“Do we get to do assassinations?”“If we do, they never happened. You imagined them.”“Whoops. My trigger finger just slipped, Sarge. Honest.”

“I wish you'd get one thing straight - I'm not a traitor. I was never on your side. I'm called the enemy.”

“Your boys okay?”“Tired, edgy, but giving it all they’ve got. One of ‘em has sworn to get Vau, another is having a love affair with a woman he shouldn’t even look at, I’m collecting waifs and strays like an animal shelter, and we nearly killed a treasury agent. But if I told you the really bad stuff, you’d think I have problems.”

“That’s the worst thing about having chakaare like us around. We just wander off, find someplace you don’t know about, and hole up in it and get into all sorts of mischief that you know nothing about. And then we bill you for it. Dreadful.”“Dreadful. Is this the kind of thing that CSF might notice?”“Were we to get out of hand, I imagine very senior officers in CSF might need to be reassured, but not by you.”“Dreadful. Hypothetically, anyway.”