“all living things are manipulated as long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted.”

“Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.”

“All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”

“But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”

“There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you.”

“Perhaps it's called the end of the world because it's the end of the games, because I can go to one of the villages and become one of the little boys working and playing there, with nothing to kill and nothing to kill me, just living there. As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what "just living" might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.”

“If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.”