Never, dear gods. Never mess with mortals. - Steven Erikson

Your cynicism lies in your willing abuse of others to consolidate your superiority over them. My cynicism is in regard to humanity’s wilful blindness with respect to its own extinction.’

‘Without that wilful blindness there is naught but despair.’

‘Oh, I am not that cynical. In fact, I do not agree at all. Maybe when the wilful blindness runs its inevitable course, there will be born wilful wisdom, the revelation of seeing things as they are.’

‘Things? To which things are you referring, old man?’

‘Why, that everything of true value is, in fact, free.

"Indeed Bugg. is it because, do you think, at the human core, we are naught but liars and cheats?" "Probably." "With no hope of ever overcoming our instinctive nastiness?" "Hard to say. How have we done so far?"

If we are to live ... we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.