Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen: Toll the Hounds

"Explanations are ephemeral. They are the sword and shield of the attack, and behind them hides motivation. Explanations strive to find weakness, and from the exploitation of weakness comes compliance and the potential of absolute surrender."
~Andarist via Nimander, pg. 57

"A man who stirs awake the serpent is a man without fear. A man without fear has forgotten the rules of life."
~Rhivi saying, pg. 67

"'Tis the grand stupidity of our kind, dear Cutter, to see all the errors of our ways, yet find in ourselves the inability to do anything about them. We sit, dumbfounded by despair, and for all our ingenuity, our perceptivity, for all our extraordinary capacity to see the truth of things, we hunker down like snails in a flood, sucked tight to our precious pebble, fearing the moment is is dislodged beneath us. Until that terrible calamity, we do nothing but cling.
"Can you even imagine a world where all crimes are punished? Where justice is truly blind and holds out no hands happy to yield to the weight of coin and influence? Where one takes responsibility for his or her mistakes, acts of negligence, the deadly consequences of indifference or laziness? Nay, instead we slip and duck, dance and dodge, dance the dodge slip duck dance, feet ablur. Ourselves transformed into shadows that flit in chaotic discord. We are indeed masters of evasion--no doubt originally a survival trait, at least in the physical sense, but to have such instincts applied to the soul is perhaps our most egregious crime against morality. What we will do so that we may continue living with ourselves. In this we might assert that a survival trait can ultimately prove its own antithesis, and in the cancelling out thereof, why, we are left with the blank, dull, vacuous expression that Kruppe sees before him."
~Kruppe, pg. 578

"He leads. In the ways of leading, the ways the rest of us cannot--and can never--understand. I looked into his eyes and I saw such resolve that I could not speak. Absence of doubt? No, nothing so egotistic as that. Nimander has plenty of doubts, so many that he's lost his fear of them. He accepts them as easily as anything else. Is that the secret? Is that the very definition of greatness?"
~Skintick, pg. 662