“Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.”

“The I am a fool,” he said bitterly. “But a fool with faith. I am tired of treating hunger pains and mending broken bones with weak painkillers and scrap-wood splints. I must believe there’s something better out there. My people deserve it. You deserve it.”

“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;And to do that well craves a kind of wit:He must observe their mood on whom he jests,The quality of persons, and the time,And, like the haggard, check at every featherThat comes before his eye. This is a practiseAs full of labour as a wise man’s artFor folly that he wisely shows is fit;But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit.”

“A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

“I was a slave, but never a fool. This empire is vast beyond imagining and we have killed only a fraction of the force they will bring against us. They will kill us, all of us, for we are slaves and we cannot be allowed even the barest hope of freedom. Without us, they have no empire.”

“The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt…He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.”

“The moment you start arguing with an ignorant fool, you have already lost.”

“In order to share one’s true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still.”

“Only a fool fears making mistakes.”

“Regardless of how foreboding it might appear, a peak without any altitude is a bump. And how many times have I ambled on top of the latter so I could fool myself into believing that I had ascended the former?”

“Being deemed a fool, even if it is done by a fool, does not hurt, unless you are a fool.”

“I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness, And put on Intellect; or my thund’rous hammer shall drive thee To wrath, which thou condemnest, till thou obey my voice.”

“The mistake was to think that the hawks were flying under their own power, when in fact they were catching the updrafts created by nature’s power. Therefore, to truly rise is not a product of our own brute force wherein we create the power. Rather, it is a seasoned wisdom that knows where to find the power.”

“Even idiots can reach old age.”

“A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom.”