“Nations aren't dirt, and they're not systems. They're people.”
Schneizel el Britannia Quotes
2 quotes from Code Geass, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Then I shall become a god. If that is what it takes to bring peace to the world.”
Light Yagami announces the same ambition in Death Note, two years before this aired, and the difference is entirely in temperature. Light says it alone in his bedroom, sweating, at the top of a crescendo. Schneizel says it to his sister, in reply to her sarcasm, in the tone of a man agreeing to take the minutes. Cornelia has just told him only a god could discipline the whole human race and he accepts the job description without raising his voice. That flatness is the characterisation. He does not want the throne, has never wanted it, and is offering to become the thing Lelouch is fighting purely because the alternative, a war that never ends, offends his sense of tidiness. Death Note's god is a boy who wants to be worshipped. This one is an administrator who has noticed the vacancy.
Read Schneizel el Britannia'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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The usual reading has this as the humane prince showing his hand, and it is nothing of the sort. His officers have just proposed bombing the Chinese Federation's ground forces from the air; he withdraws, and his stated reason is that the High Eunuchs have lost the people's support and are therefore no longer useful as partners. Nations are people is a claim about legitimacy, not compassion. An ally who loses the crowd is dropped that afternoon. The same calculation returns at the end of the series pointed the other way, when he decides that since people are people and driven by what they want, the reliable way to govern them is fear from orbit. Both sentences come from one premise, and the premise is a management theory. Read it as kindness and the Damocles comes out of nowhere. Read it as accounting and it is the first line of the ledger.