In most cases, a man trying to change the world fails for one simple and unavoidable reason: everyone else.
I can walk away from this fight if I just sign my name beneath a solemn oath never again to do violence against it. No. Not after all it has taken from me. I will do great violence against that thing. They say they will pardon us all, but I say that to offer to pardon something one fears is the act of a coward. To offer them in volume suggests that their fear of us is becoming unmanageable. That we have shown them what we are and it terrifies them.
This is how they survive. They paint the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons. Their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn’t true. We can prove that it isn’t true. In the dark there is discovery. There is possibility. There is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it. - Captain Flint
These men, who brought me here today, do not fear me. They brought me here today because they fear you, and because they know that my voice, the voice that refuses to be enslaved, once lived in you. And may yet still. They brought me here today to show you death, and use it to frighten you into ignoring that voice. But know this. We are many. They are few. To fear death is a choice, and they can’t hang us all. Get on with it, motherfucker. - Captain Charles Vane
A story is true, a story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It’s found truth in its maturity. Which if a virtue in man ought to be no less so for the things men create.
What’s it all for if it goes unremembered? It’s the art that leaves the mark. But to leave it, it must transcend. It must speak for itself. It must be true. - Captain Jack Rackham
I have no story to tell. Not unremarkable, just without relevance. A long time ago, I absolved myself from the obligation of finding any. No need to account for all my life’s events in the context of a story that somehow defines me. Events, some of which, no one could divine any meaning from, other than that the world is a place of unending horrors. I’ve come to peace with the knowledge that there is no storyteller imposing any coherence, nor sense, nor grace upon those events. Therefore, there is no duty on my part to search for it.
My name is John Silver, and I’ve got a long fucking memory. - Long John Silver