"No golden age to discover now," he whispered. "No end to disease and starvation. No, bright sparkling cities reaching the clouds ... All that I have lived for is gone now. I am so tired.""Then think on this, priest: You stopped the Eternal from finding greater weapons. Your actions here have led to her death. The world is free again.""Free? Of one tyrant perhaps. You think there will be no others?""No, I do not. But I know there will always be men to stand against them. You grieve because of a pure magic lost. That magic was corrupted by evil. This is how evil thrives. We find an herb that cures disease, and someone will make a poison from it. We forge iron to make a better plow, and someone will make a sharper sword. There can be no power that evil will not corrupt."

“Only a fool loves war. Or a man who has never seen it. The trouble is that the survivors forget about the horrors and remember only the battle lust. They pass on that memory, and other men hunger for it.”

“All legends have a base in fact.”

“By nature of definition only the coward is capable of the highest heroism.”

“This world has few redeeming features, and one is the capacity for people to love one another with great, enduring passion.”

“Never let anger, or outrage, or fear affect you. That is easy advice to give, but hard to follow. Men will bait you, they will laugh at you, they will jeer. But it is just noise, Kiall. They will hurt the people you love. They will do anything to make you angry or emotional. But the only way you can make them suffer is to win. And to do that you must remain cool.”

“Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone fails at something.”