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“Personally, I always feel that survival is cheap at any price and it puzzles me that so many men in authority don’t seem to see it that way.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“It slowly dawned on me that it’s possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can’t figure out the politics, or they think it’ll be horrendously unpopular, or it’ll cost too much money,”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“We can’t let him win. Even if it takes fifty years, or a hundred. You can’t let the bad guys win. It’s not acceptable.â€�

For Hodda, life is drama. It falls into a set number of clearly defined categories: tragedy, comedy, romance, burlesque, farce. If it’s a comedy, the good guys win and everybody gets married. If it’s a tragedy, the good guys win but everybody dies. But you can’t let the bad guys win. Nobody’s going to pay to see that.

Me, I don’t care about the bad guys, so long as they keep the hell away from me. When they get too close, in my face, I tell lies and run away. That means I’ll never be a hero, but I don’t mind that. I do character parts and impersonations.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“(The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people’s lives.)”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“And with every massive success you notch up, you ask for and get more money, not because you want it to buy things with but because it’s the only reliable way in this business of keeping score. If you’re getting x every night but your best friend and deadliest rival is getting x+1, it’s enough to break your heart. So you try harder, and harder still.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“There was once a king in a far-off land who said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Like I said, I’m a disappointment to her. She wanted me to be a murderer and an extortionist, like my father.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Everything changes, see above. Nothing changes more often, more rapidly or more radically than the past. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Yesterday’s eternal truths are today’s exploded myths. Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely.

Which is odd, since the past has already happened; it’s done, complete, finished, signed off, sealed, delivered; dead. But, then, dead things change a hell of a lot, as the smell testifies. I tend to think of the past as compost; drifts of dead yesterdays rotting down into a fine mulch, in which all sorts of weeds germinate, sprout and flourish. Of course, the past changes, it can’t not change, and what was true yesterday�

See above, passim. Change and decay in all around I see; everything changes, except for me.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush.

Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers. Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren’t; and here’s a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren’t, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“She drank her wine, looking at me over the rim of her glass. It's a mannerism that has made her very popular with men over the years, and I guess it's like the violin: you have to keep practicing even when you're not performing to an audience.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Lysimachus probably wouldn’t have listened at all. More likely, he’d have smacked her across the face. Funny, really. I could unleash violence and death on women and children in Mahec, but I could no more hit a woman than fly in the air; because I’m civilised, I suppose. I guess the difference is between what happens offstage and on. A manager once told me, you can have your hero butcher entire nations in a messenger’s report, but for God’s sake don’t have him hit a woman or a child on stage. You’d lose all sympathy.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“The more she sticks the knife in, the more I resent it, the less I actually think about what she’s been saying. That, of course, presupposes that the object of the exercise from her point of view is to change my mind about what I’m doing, as opposed to beating me to a pulp.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Since when did you care about the enemy? You know what that word means, don’t you? Or would it help if you looked it up?â€�

“I know what it means,� she said. “It means what you want it to mean. It means you can do what you damn well like. Do you like having people killed, Notker? Does it make you feel big and strong?�

“Enemy means someone who wants to hurt you,� I said. “Them or us, simple as that.�

“Simple.â€� She gave me a look I won’t forget in a hurry. “I don’t think there’s any point talking to you. Remember Andronica in The Golden Mask? That’s you, just the wrong way round.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“And it’s what’s true now that matters, sure as eggs is eggs. Think about it logically. Unless you’re a bit wrong in the head, you can remember what happened one minute ago clear as day. But you’ll be forgiven for being a bit hazy about the details of something you did or said twenty years ago. So, if there’s a discrepancy, the minute-old truth is far more likely to be correct than an inconsistent version dating back twenty years.

Twenty years ago â€� longer than that â€� I was Notker. Right now I’m Lysimachus, and this time tomorrow I’ll be Lysimachus II. And I have the scars to prove it.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“I could unleash violence and death on women and children in Mahec, but I could no more hit a woman than fly in the air; because I’m civilised, I suppose.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Still, it was better than sitting around playing cards waiting to have your throat cut.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“Act 2 is always a grind. With the exception of Acts 1 and 3, it’s the hardest part of your standard three-act play.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“I can imagine what you’re thinking â€� not telepathy, just a process of logical deduction. For a start, you’re reading this, so you can read, so obviously you’re educated, therefore you belong to the better sort â€� and I know you people like the back of my hand. You’re thinking: if he’s starving it’s his own stupid fault, because there’s always work in this man’s town; not the sort he’s used to, maybe, drooping around theatres and rich men’s drawing rooms for a few hours in the evening parroting someone else’s words”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“She drank her wine, looking at me over the rim of the glass. It’s a mannerism that has made her very popular with men over the years, and I guess it’s like the violin: you have to keep practising even when you’re not performing to an audience.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

“For ten days, all I’d had to wash in was the piss-pot, and the nearest water was the pump, five flights of narrow, winding steps down, and loneliness had been the least of my problems, if you count tiny things that bite as company. I’m not the most fastidious of men, but I don’t like it when I turn into the sort of creature I’d cross the street to avoid.”
― K.J. Parker, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It