“I may not have the protection of your Ultimate Shield, but I clearly see your weakness with my Ultimate Eye. Now then, Greed. How many times do I have to kill you before you stay dead?”
King Bradley Quotes
2 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Head of state of Amestris and, by his creator's own count, the twelfth candidate for the job of being Wrath. Fights like an administrator and ages like a man, which is both the joke and the threat.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I myself have never believed in fate or God. If they exist, perhaps this is their way of divine justice or providence.”
Said by the one homunculus who was not extracted from anything but selected. Father tells him to his face that he is the twelfth candidate for the role, which is the kind of sentence that only gets said when the first eleven are not available for comment. Read against that, the refusal is not philosophy, it is accurate record-keeping. Nothing about his existence was providential and he has seen the paperwork.
Read King Bradley's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Grant the cynical reading first: this is a taunt and nothing else, a powerful character narrating his advantage over a weaker one, and half of it is exactly that. What complicates it is the speaker's day job. Bradley is the head of state of Amestris, and the sentence he reaches for is administrative: a question about repetition and how much of it a task will take. He is not savouring the kill. He is filing it, which is the more frightening register of the two.