David Eddings Quotes

I'll need a few kegs of your gold, though," he added.
Althalus shrugged. "I had a feeling that might crop up."
"'Money makes the mare go,'" Kreuter quoted.
"Wouldn't she settle for oats?"
"She might, but I won't.

Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be.

‘Labor contractor’ sounds so much nicer than ‘slave trader,’ wouldn’t you say?

Getting some of your people killed is part of the business of command.

Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?
“When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.”
What gave you the absurd idea that [the world]’s broken?
“It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.”
[...] Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.

The Queen of Night was in full voice when Althalus and the others reached the battlements on the eastern side of the city, and her catapults were hurling boulders at the walls of Mawor with a monotonous thudding sound. “I’m starting to get a bellyful of that,” Duke Nitral growled. “I spent a fortune on that marble sheathing on the outer wall, and she’s breaking it all to pieces with those accursed engines. Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m going to do something about that right now.” He went on down the parapet to a cluster of peculiar-looking engines. “What are those things?” Eliar asked curiously.
“Nitral calls them arbalests,” Koleika replied. “They’re sort of an oversized bow. They’ll throw a spear for half a mile. Nitral and I’ve come up with a way to make life very interesting for those catapult crews out there.”
Duke Nitral barked a sharp command to the men around the arbalests, and a sheet of spears trailing fire shot out in long arcs from the high walls of Mawor.

"We don’t believe in your wars, we don’t believe in your customs, and we don’t believe in your Gods.”
“Your lives are empty, then.”
“The money sort of fills that up—at least that’s what Sergeant Khalor told us.”

Wars are a summer pastime, Althalus. Politics is a year-round entertainment.

Why must they always set fires?" Bheid asked Althalus as the two of them stood on the portico of the temple waiting and watching the columns of smoke rising from various quarters of the city. "I'm not really sure, Bheid," Althalus confessed. "It might just be accidental. Looters are usually fairly excited, and sometimes they get careless. My best guess, though, is that the fires are being set deliberately to punish the noblemen for their bad habits." "That's pure stupidity, Althalus," Bheid objected. "Of course it is. It's the nature of mobs to be stupid. A mob's only as clever as its stupidest member.

"... Can you pretend to be stupid?”
Eliar made a rueful kind of face. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m a country boy from the highlands of Arum. We invented stupid.”

The theorists make high-minded speeches. Their followers cheer and applaud—briefly—and then they get back to the business of appropriating everything of value.

When some idiot jumps up and starts shouting, ‘My God’s better than your God,’ I don’t pay very much attention—except to hide my purse.

The prosperity of all Arum might well hinge upon what we do here in this day... [If] Arum Chiefs are dishonorable men, who will ever come to these sacred mountains again with gold to deal with us? Take less, my sons, that ye may gain more.

You don't carry spears or bows?"
"They'd just get in the way, sir. A sling doesn't weigh hardly anything, and you can find good rocks anywhere."
"I thought the sling was just a child's toy."
"Oh, no, Sergeant Khalor," Althalus told him. "I carried a sling for years myself when I was younger. It kept me eating on a regular basis."
"Could a man kill a horse with one?"
"Easily. The bone between a horse's eyes isn't very thick. I haven't used a sling for a long time, but I'm fairly certain I could drop a horse in midstride from a hundred paces."
"That's a little hard to swallow, Althalus."
"I've taken rabbits at fifty paces — and a horse is quite a bit bigger than a rabbit.

Religion’s based on a desire to know what’s going to happen in the future. Astrologers believe that the stars control that.