Stupidity is a sickness that goes very well with fear. They nurture each other, creating a gangrene that seeks only to propagate itself.

My name is Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it. I insist on that. I want everyone to know it.

Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.

But sometimes, Brodeck, wisdom's not what we think it is. The creatures you see before you are savage beasts. Truly savage, however much they look like beached whales. Brutes with no heart and no mind. With no memory, either. Nothing counts but their belly, just their belly; all the time they think of one thing and one thing only: keeping that belly full.

Saint-liness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they are mistaken and that makes them furious. They commit a grievous crime. This is no doubt the reason that most saints end up martyrs.

People still works their fields with ploughshares forged over a century ago. Haymaking has to be done by hand. Everyone has taken a step backwards, as if humanity had suffered a huge hiccough, as if human history had given man a violent kick in the backside and now we have to start all over again almost from scratch.

She cannot have known that once you abandon Hell, you must never go back there. But in the end there is no difference between dying from ignorance and dying beneath the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there is nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it is served.