David Weber > Quotes

“It was rumored she held grudges till they died of old age, then had them stuffed and mounted.”
― David Weber, Field of Dishonor

“Your Grace," she said, "I have only one question. Do you wish this man crippled, or dead?”
― David Weber, Flag in Exile

“Oh, bother!,” said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.”
― David Weber

“She didn't know a lot about politics – yet – but she'd learned enough in her history classes to know politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.”
― David Weber, A Beautiful Friendship

“Vegtables, what food eats before it becomes food.”
― David Weber, Out of the Dark

“WAGs... That's a technical term we engineers use. It means 'Wild-Assed Guess'.”
― David Weber, On Basilisk Station

“Tisiphone stood silent and helpless in Alicia's mind. It was all she could do to keep Alicia's blind savagery from dragging Megaira under and clouding the lightning-fast reflexes which kept them both alive.
She'd never guessed what she was creating, never imagined the monster she'd spawned. She'd seen the power of Alicia DeVries's mind without recognizing the controls which kept that power in check, and only now had she begun to understand fully what she had done.
She had shattered those controls. The compassion and mercy she'd feared no longer existed, only the red, ravening hunger. Yet terrible as that might be, there was worse. She'd found the hole Alicia had gnawed through the wall about her inner rage, and she couldn't close it. Somehow, without even realizing it was possible, Alicia had reached beyond herself. She'd followed Tisiphone's connection to the Fury's own rage, her own destruction, and made that incalculable power hers as well.
For the first time in millennia, Tisiphone faced another as powerful as herself, a mortal mind which had stolen the power of the Furies themselves, and that power had driven it mad.”
― David Weber, In Fury Born (1)

“Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts,”
― David Weber, Echoes of Honor

“There are two sides to every dialogue, but if you accept the other side's terms without demanding equal time for your own, then they control the debate and its outcome.”
― David Weber, The Honor of the Queen

“Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair
of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury,
with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he
suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his
fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the
right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an
unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and
her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring"
spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing
City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd
bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when
she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords,
with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own
murdered steaders at her back.
But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the
Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that
moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her
equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of
devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much
a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself
had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she
could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances.
And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last
he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty,
and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong
circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met.
In fact, at this moment, she was .
It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or
even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply
personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space
itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy
shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those
agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew
now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a
determination which would not— couldnot—relent or rest.
"I'll miss them," she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, "but I won't forget. I'll never forget,
and one day— oneday, Hamish—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we
do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them.”
― David Weber, Mission of Honor

“Oh, hell," Thandi muttered, her heart lower than ever. "I really blew it, didn't I?"

"Don't be silly," Berry scolded. "It's just your first lovers' spat. You accused of him of being an inhuman fiend, and he got a little miffed. No big deal.”
― David Weber, Crown of Slaves

“The bigger the lie, apparently, the more likely the uninformed were to accept it, simply because they couldn't believe any government would tell such an absurd story unless it were true.”
― David Weber, On Basilisk Station

“On a scale from one to ten,” Captain Krasnitsky muttered, “I give this trip a negative four hundred.”
― David Weber John Ringo, March Upcountry

“Cathy smiled back ‘Rules were meant to be broken.’

‘Don’t disagree,’ Oversteegen replied immediately. ‘Indeed they are. Providin’, however, that the one breakin’ the rules is willin’ t’ pay the price for it, and the price gets charged in full. Which you were, Lady Catharine. I saluted you for it then–at the family dinner table that night, in fact. My mother was infinitely more indisposed thereafter; tottered back t’ her bed cursin’ me for an ingrate. My father was none too pleased either. I salute you for it, again. Otherwise, breakin’ rules becomes the province of brats instead of heroes. Fastest way I can think t’ turn serious political affairs int’ a playpen. A civilized society needs a conscience, and conscience can’t be developed without martyrs—real ones—against which a nation can measure its crimes and sins.”
― David Weber, Crown of Slaves

“This just gets worse and worse," Rob Pierre sighed as he skimmed Leonard Boardman's synopsis of his latest gleanings from the Solarian League reporters covering the PRH. "How can one person—one person, Oscar!—do this much damage? She's like some damned elemental force of nature!"

"Harrington?" Oscar Saint-Just quirked an eyebrow and snorted harshly at Pierre's nodded confirmation.

"She's just happened to be in the right places—or the wrong ones, I suppose, from our perspective—for the last, oh, ten years or so. That's the official consensus from my analysts, at least. The other theory, which seems to have been gaining a broader following of late, is that she's in league with the Devil.”
― David Weber, Ashes of Victory

“Let's be about it, people.”
― David Weber, On Basilisk Station

“We will maintain heading until he's committed, then I want a hard
skew-turn to starboard. As hard as you can make it, Chief. I want our starboard broadside on him as he passes below us, and then I want to cut down across his stern and stick it right up his kilt. Clear? (Honor Harrington)”
― David Weber, Honor Among Enemies

“There are two sides to any war-game, Your Highness, and the other side is trying to win, too.”
― David Weber, March Upcountry

“Never keep a lawyer waiting. They have friends in low and infernal places.”
― David Weber, Ashes of Victory

“Extremists tend to grow more extreme, not less, as problems get closer to solutions,”
― David Weber, The Honor of the Queen

“Nuts didn't need religion to make them nuts, Allison had long since decided, but it did seem to give them a certain added sense of commitment to whatever goals their nutdom decided to embrace.”
― David Weber, Ashes of Victory

“Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself to it knowingly, it was as cold as it was hot, as rational as it was lethal. To embrace the Rage was to embrace a splendor, a glory, a denial of all restraint but not of reason. It was pure, elemental purpose, unencumbered by compassion or horror or pity, yet it was far more than mere frenzy.”
― David Weber, Oath of Swords

“Yet i say to you, do not rush to marriage for it is a deep and perfect thing. Test first, that you may be certain you are called to it by love, and not simply by pleasures of the flesh which will consume themselves and leave only ashes and misery”
― David Weber, Flag in Exile

“...the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.”
― David Weber, The Honor of the Queen

“There's a reason I've always relied on you for the necessary political miracles, Emily," Hamish told her with a smile. "Give me a fleet problem, or a naval battle to fight, and I “know exactly what to do. But dealing with scum like High Ridge and Descroix—?" He shook his head. "I just can't wrap my mind around how to handle them."
"Be honest, dear," Emily corrected him gently. "It's not that you really can't do it, and you know it. It's that you get so furious with them that you wind up climbing onto your high moral horse so you can ride them under the hooves of your righteous fury. But when you close your knight errant's helmet, the visibility through that visor is just a little limited, isn't it?”
― David Weber, War of Honor

“Apparently, for some reason known only to themselves, these people... have chosen to cling to hydrocarbon-fueled power generation well past the point at which they could have replaced it with nuclear generation.”
― David Weber, Out of the Dark

“It had to be the greatest irony in the history of mankind, he thought. The last Christian in the entire universe was a machine.”
― David Weber, Off Armageddon Reef

“She really should be careful about imputing sordid motives to the First Lord. Not because she doubted that he had them, but because not even Sir Edward Janacek could have only sordid motivations. That would have completely devalued his ability to do such things out of simple stupidity, instead of calculation.”
― David Weber, War of Honor

“McKeon: “You know Hauptman is going to deny they had anything to do with it [smuggling].”

“Forty-three million in illegal peltries? Of course they will, just as Mondragon's captain insists the space fairies must have brought them,” Honor said ironically.”
― David Weber, On Basilisk Station

“Fail not in this charge at your peril.”
― David Weber, On Basilisk Station