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I feel sorry for you, Sheev Palpatine. You have my Pity, but you do not have my sympathy. I would wish you to a long and ignoble death, but I would see you to a swift and final one.
I will not curse you when you are dead, for to speak ill of the dead is an insult that would rouse even the most Doom-bound; but I would speak your life how you lived it.
How Darth Sidious did not know love or pity, or any emotion that was not bound up in his own evil. If Sheev had any of that, it was purged from him long ago, and he does not ache its loss or even notice its absence other than to laugh that he is not like other men. How this the Apprentice of Plageous the Wise [Plageous the Searcher of Knowledge] twisted a galaxy into his own mold [destroying the opportunity for True Knowledge]. How he would rather damn all that was his [his apprentices, his people, his subjects] to his own fate. Would twist their souls into a far more broken shape so that he may look whole, if only to his own eyes, rather than lose his power. All this that was made, all the work of his hands, to flee death and to send as many before him as to somehow cushion his inevitable fall into the pit [into the grey of the Force that all those who were tied to the Jetti fear].
[None have survived life, even the immortals, although many can tell the tales of life and death--Jedi and Sith, Ashla and Bogan, the Dark and the Light]
~~Thought Break~~
Knowledge is but another form of torment.
Ignorance in ambitious men is sometimes preferable because of this. If they had the wisdom to know all the pitfalls and the outcomes, they might yet stall and have no chance of completing their goals. Accomplishment is on a knifes edge and no amount of preparation will make a Great man when the moment comes, only Luck or Fate to be in the Place at the Time and the internal Will or the cowardice that causes a different action so that he acts.
The only way to fight a prophet, a far-seer, is to be inevitable. Yet the only way to survive as a prophet, a far-seer, and do great things is to blind yourself to the future until it is the present. Great men are rarely Prophets because to See all that is coming means Knowing all that will go wrong. To have the Knowledge that this action or another will cause the pain that will make a Great man will never result in that action being done. A man, no matter how noble, will always balk at pain if it can be avoided, and a seer will always See another way. The ambitions of a seer will necessarily crumble in the face of the Seeing, and he will be naught but fear. Wise? incredibly so; Knowledgeable as well; but a Great man? not likely.
All great men are cowards who accidentally made a charge or a stand or a retreat that caught on. Their actions are their only witnesses to their cowardice, their thoughts are their own.