Have any of these thoughts been my own? Look at me—my every move seems a desperate search for someone to blame, always someone else. I’ve made being … - Steven Erikson

He thinks I will hit him. Strike him, with a large stick. Foolish mule. Oh no, I am much more cunning. I will surprise him with kindness… until he grows calm and dispenses with all watchfulness, and then… ha! I shall punch him in the nose! Won't he be surprised! No mule can match wits with me. Oh yes, many have tried, and almost all have failed!

An old man emerged from the ditch, a creature
Of mud and wild autumn winds capering
Like a hare across a bouldered field, across
And through the stillness of time unhinged
That sprawls patient and unexpected in the
Place where battle lies spent, unmoving and
Never again moving bodies strewn and
Death-twisted like lost languages tracking
Contorted glyphs on a barrow door, and he
read well the aftermath, the disarticulated script
Rent and dissolute the pillars of self toppled
Like termite towers all spilled out round his
Dancing feet, and he shouted in gleeful
Revelation the truth he'd found, in these
Red-fleshed pronouncements - “There is peace!”
He shrieked. “There is peace!” and it was
No difficult thing, where I sat in the saddle
Above salt-rimed horseflesh to lift my crossbow
Aim and loose the quarrel, skewering the madman
To his proclamation. “Now,” said I, in the
Silence that followed, “Now, there is peace.

Discipline is the greatest weapon against the self-righteous. We must measure the virtue of our own controlled response when answering the atrocities of fanatics. And yet, let it not be claimed, in our own oratory of piety, that we are without our own fanatics; for the self-righteous breed wherever tradition holds, and most often when there exists the perception that tradition is under assault. Fanatics can be created as easily in an environment of moral decay (whether real or imagined) as in an environment of legitimate inequity or under the banner of a common cause.

Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers- and let us not be coy here- naught but murder.

And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause.