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Quote by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

“The realities of pitched warfare rarely made it into the sagas. In all the stories he’d heard, especially those woeful diatribes from the remembrancers, battle was reduced to a handful of heroes going blade-to-blade in the sunlight, while their nameless lessers looked on in stupefied awe. It took a great deal to make Khârn cringe, but war poetry never failed.”

Quote by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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Betrayer

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Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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“Governments predicate the call for war upon very terrible lies: that it will restrain evil men, make honest and courageous men out of boys, and the outcome depends upon the moral virtuousness of the combatants. Warfare is obscene, an evil waste of life, and a destroyer of civilization. Society can salvage no virtue or rectitude from the larger waste of destroying cities and killing people. There is no moral message deduced from warfare. All warfare is barbaric and inhuman.”

“War provides some people with a sense of purposefulness. The drumbeat of war quickens the pulse of neighbors, relatives, tribes, and nations. Hostile nations amass weapons of destruction claiming that they seek peace through deterrence. When war comes, advocates of arms galvanize the citizenry by proclaiming the inevitability of conflict. Each side’s propaganda machine cast the campaign of present war as the next Great War. Generals brashly promote armed conflict as the war to end all other wars. Saber-rattlers proclaim that the opposition’s militant disciples instituted this ordeal of conquest and destruction.”

“Soldiers,' he made an insult of the word. 'Once we were crusaders Khayon, and now we're warriors, but we were never soldiers. Keep that foolishness to yourself.' I swallowed my argument, following his train of thought. It was not the first time legionaries have disagreed over those semantics, and it would be far from the last. Some believed soldiering came down to discipline, or fighting for a state or a leader rather than for yourself. Some believed warriorhood was a matter of heart that elevated them above a soldier's station, while others considered it a state of barbarity that dragged them beneath it. Some questions have no answers. No matter how seriously we took warfare, no matter how adamantly we clung to our disciplined roots as a Space Marine Legion, many of our number were ultimately the raiders and marauders that time had made them. For better or worse, we would never have the ironclad discipline of a Throne-loyal Adeptus Astartes force. Even back then, we had lost much of the discipline we had once possessed as Legions of the Great Crusade.”