“I told you before, Lelouch, that I was going to change this world from the inside.”
Suzaku Kururugi Quotes
2 quotes from Code Geass, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The friend on the other side: a Japanese boy who joined the army that conquered his country because he believed a good part could change a machine. His best lines are terms of a deal, and he ends the series living inside the one he wrote.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You told the world a lie when you proclaimed you were a knight for justice. Why don't you live up to that lie by trying to become a true knight for justice. Then you'll have the lie going, to the very end.”
He is standing over a man who has just knelt on the gravel of the Kururugi shrine and begged, for the first time in his life, and he offers a deal instead of forgiveness: keep the lie going, all the way, and make it true by conduct. It sounds like mercy. It is also the sentence the ending is built from, and Suzaku is the one who ends up paying it. Within minutes the soldiers he arranged to hand Lelouch to arrive, the deal collapses, and the two do not speak again until they are planning Zero Requiem. What they plan is this speech taken literally: a lie carried to the very end, a knight for justice made true by a final act, except that the knight who has to live inside the mask afterwards is Suzaku, not Lelouch. He wrote the terms for someone else and inherited them.
Read Suzaku Kururugi'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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He says it having just delivered his best friend to the Emperor in exchange for a seat among the Knights of the Round, and when Lelouch asks whether that includes selling out his friends, the answer is a flat yes. This is not a new position; it is the only position he has ever held. At ten he killed his own father, the Prime Minister, to end a war, a private act with a national consequence, and everything since has been the same shape. Join the army of the people who conquered you. Pilot their prototype. Become a princess's knight. Change from inside means, for Suzaku, becoming a part in the machine and trusting that a good part changes the whole. The series is not kind to the theory. The machine takes his princess, rewrites his friend, and hands him a Geass command to live that overrides his own conscience. What it gives him back is the inside of a mask.