This is what politics is about, right? We help the people discover the threat to their security, then we provide them with a solution.

Education can so easily unseat one’s confidence about the truth of the world, Mal noted privately.

After five or six weeks of listening to his sermons on healing and renewing, Edgers felt healed and renewed—especially after the caravan of supplies arrived from Idumea—and stopped attending. When the crisis was gone, so was the need to feel the Creator.

Anyone who thought women were softer, or calmer, or gentler had obviously never visited Edge: home of vindictive females.

You like to claim that you’re in charge of the world, but it’s as if the world hasn’t noticed and it does whatever it pleases in spite of you. You claim the sky is blue, but almost on a daily basis it betrays you.

Remember this moment when you first realized that the government can’t properly take care of people. In fact, that’s never been their responsibility. They’re supposed to keep our borders safe so that we can live as we wish. It’s our responsibility—yours and mine and Zenos’s and everyone else’s—to take care of each other.

That’s precisely what the governing body should NOT do—manage every detail of their lives. We are not their meddling grandmothers; we exist to keep them safe so they can make their own decisions, resolve their own problems, and live their own lives as their conscience dictates. We are NOT to become that conscience.

Each person was in the power of the Creator, or could be turned over to be battered by the Refuser. Every soul was equal in the Creator’s eyes. That was comforting and troubling at the same time.

That must be what power does to a man: erases what he knows and makes him remember only what services him at the moment.

There’s discipline, Mahrree knew, and then there’s abuse. The first works, while the second never does. And some people, like Lemuel Thorne, had no idea there was even a difference.