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If reference to Sith, Yoda said:

Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice

Yoda

Yet, the same can be said of Jedi: Every master has 1 apprentice and every apprentice 1 master:

Yoda and Qui-Gon

Qui-Gon and Obi-wan

Obi-wan and Anakin

Anakin and Ahsoka

Obi-wan and Luke

Luke and Kylo

However, there is more than one Jedi Master/Padawan combination. Can the same be true of Sith without making Yoda a liar?

The reason for this question is: I saw this quote on Star Wars' Wiki

"The Dark Lords of the Sith are destined to rise again."

Note: "Lords" - plural...

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    Basically, there's a thing called the Rule of Two. Sith didn't really follow it, thus their numbers vary greatly. The reason why Yoda says this is because he's not well-informed about the workings of the contemporary Sith. See here
    – Gallifreyan
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 8:58
  • Also here
    – Gallifreyan
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 9:02
  • 2
    I always took it to mean that they work in pairs - master and padawan, but there can be as many pairs as you like. There were plenty of younglings in training, but they were not yet padawans. The pairing off largely working alone, also suggested a cell-like organization to the Sith, each cell independent, unaware of the others' jobs of plans
    – VBartilucci
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 15:47
  • Hilarious meme that.
    – Z. Cochrane
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 16:12

2 Answers 2

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There can always be more than two Sith. This was simply the Sith rule that had been applied for (1000?) years. Darth Bane introduced the Rule of Two so that the Sith may become stronger. At the time there were many more Sith. Bane felt that it made them weak, since they didn't strive to be as powerful as they could be. There are many instances in legends where Sith masters during the time of the Rule of two had multiple apprentices and pitted them against each other. Yoda is simply referring to the rule that he has most likely learned sometime during his long life.

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  • While this information is mostly non-canonical now (Legends), we do kind of see a canonical application when Dooku is ordered by Sidious to kill his apprentice in TCW.
    – TVann
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 15:23
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Two

The Databank, among other sources, suggests that Yoda was reasonably well-informed about the way the Sith operate:

An ancient and legendary Sith Lord, it was Darth Bane who saw that the Sith traditions of old were ultimately a dead end. All too often, squabbling Sith in their bid for power upended carefully laid plans. After the Sith were decimated by the Jedi Knights of a thousand years ago, Bane enacted the Sith rule of two: there would be only two active Sith at one time – a Dark Lord to embody the power, and an apprentice to crave it.

There are two, and only two, active Sith at a time. While Vader bent the rules a bit by having non-Sith Inquisitors, and Dooku by training Asajj Ventress as an assassin (and perhaps later as an actual Sith), this is nonetheless the rule they purport to follow.

The interpretation in the question also doesn’t seem like a natural interpretation of what Yoda is saying: he does, after all, say “no more, no less.”

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