"It’s usually just ambition that puts them into it—and like any group of people selected for ambition and nothing else, they turn out to be a pretty bad lot. Like mandarins in China, colonial administrators in the British Empire, lawyers in old North America, or the reconstruction agencies after the Slaughter—individually there are decent people who do some good, but as a class they’re amoral, vicious leeches with a good cover story."

“Brains don’t exactly run in that family—they sort of dribble slowly away.”

“Are you up to faking being sincere underneath faking being fake?”

“How he must have been astonished to see people behaving decently when what they believed was absolute anathema to him.”

“And just like this, all of a sudden, your people and mine will begin to talk?" "It only looks sudden from some places. Running off a cliff is sudden if you don't know it's there, even if you have been running toward it for days." "That's not a reassuring metaphor." "It isn't meant to be.”

“It's a good idea for diplomats to keep their word in small matters. It makes the later complete betrayals more of a surprise.”

“The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.”