Joel Shepherd > Quotes

“You mean one human is good, but a hundred humans is bad?"

"Exactly. One human is just a person. A hundred humans make a society. And societies have kings, and religions and priests, and all these other things serrin completely fail to understand”
― Joel Shepherd, Petrodor

“He said we're all going to die,'
'And what did you say?'
'I said that's why i'm here”
― Joel Shepherd (Tracato), Tracato

“It is the way, isn't it? With humans and free thought. They only learn through terrible mistakes. Free thought does not make wisdom. Instead it creates enough space for men to commit terrible folly, from which the survivors learn through disaster.”
― Joel Shepherd, Tracato

“Sasha,' Kessligh said around his mouthful, 'if you'd seen as many people killed as I have, all because one of them believes this thing and the other believes this other thing, you wouldn't think it was all so harmless. Tales and legends are fun, but beliefs, Sasha. Beliefs are dangerous. Be careful what you believe in, for beliefs are far more dangerous then swords.”
― Joel Shepherd, Sasha

“Revolutionary ideas may be wonderful, but revolutions are nasty. You can't cure a headache by cutting off the patients head.”
― Joel Shepherd, Tracato

“She paused before the fallen rider. He stared up at her from within a grimacing, battle stained face. Hatred and fear battled for supremacy in his eyes. Sasha met his gaze directly with a stare of utter contempt.
'Where are your gods now?' she said.”
― Joel Shepherd , Sasha

“human societies always define themselves by their narrowest possible interests.That they are exclusive not inclusive.”
― Joel Shepherd, Petrodor

“No sheth an sary'
(No herb shall heal like blood on the steel)”
― Joel Shepherd, Tracato

“It's wise to learn how to cook,' Kessligh fumed, 'but a meal prepared over three weeks is inedible! There is wisdom in action! So stop talking, and act!”
― Joel Shepherd, Tracato

“Life is a battle, Sasha. All existence is in conflict. We fight the elements, we fight our consciences, we fight the limitations and eventual mortality of our bodies. All things happen by conflict, of one sort or another.”
― Joel Shepherd, Sasha

“your words are pure poison, Master Reynold,' said Lesthen. 'You and your kind suffer from the worst disease of humanity, the willingness to subordinate truth, to lock reason in chains and to rape the objective thought, in order to achieve your objective.”
― Joel Shepherd, Tracato

“The problem, Sasha, is not what a person believes in. Verenthane, pagan, Lisan Skyworship, the Kazeri desert mystics – it’s all the same, all have the potential to be equally good or bad. The problem is not what things are believed, the problem is how people choose to believe them.”
― Joel Shepherd, Petrodor

“but the one thing they’d taught him in the Academy that he already knew from his father was that a man only got as much respect as he gave himself.”
― Joel Shepherd, Renegade

“That’s not pride. That’s fear. Pride is being so certain in yourself that you’re not intimidated by the strangeness of others. Pride is being so certain that you can look after yourself that you don’t need to threaten or complain or make malicious whispers behind others’ backs.”
― Joel Shepherd, Petrodor

“When meeting with powerful people about things that matter,’ he’d said, ‘never play yourself down. It’s unprofessional”
― Joel Shepherd, Renegade

“All lost, because one of the galaxy’s many life forms saw all the others as resources to be consumed. It was an attitude all life began with. Some grew out of it.”
― Joel Shepherd, Rando Splicer

“And there’s nothing in all human space that scares me like human leadership scared of facts.”
― Joel Shepherd, Renegade

“People who think they're already perfect abandon all hope of self-improvement. That's the trap.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“I have identified patterns in the technology and civilisational behaviour that confirms to me, with great certainty, that approximately thirty thousand human years ago, about ten thousand years after the date of the ceephays’ fall, a new center of data and physical traffic accumulated at the Keijir System. Ten thousand years correlates closely with how long I estimate a ceephay vessel would have taken to travel some feasible sublight to avoid detection using jump engines, until being discovered by reeh vessels, possibly in some kind of hibernation. The accumulation of technologies at the Keijir System was very rapid, and was responded to by several of the species who were recording this data. There are even several surviving speculations from their academia at the time, wondering what was happening at Keijir. I believe these events are entirely consistent with the discovery, by an organic species of lesser intelligence and capability, of an entity of greater intelligence and capability. Great technological advances appear to have followed, and the expansion of what became the Reeh Empire commenced shortly thereafter.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“Sasha smiled darkly. “We must find this ambassador. If I were to throw him at the feet of the Ilduuri Steel, their attitude toward the Remischtuul might change.”
“Getting this ambassador may not be easy.”
Sasha shrugged. “I don't need all of him. His head will do.”
― Joel Shepherd, Haven

“The corporate joke among humans was that the official symbol of the barabo financial regulator was a shrug.”
― Joel Shepherd, Drysine Legacy

“Given some recent events, he'd come to doubt whether being a great warrior was all some made it out to be. But now he'd seen great warriors save the entire corbi race. And Liala had led them, not with bravado and shouting, but with calculation, patience and reason. Being a warrior, then, was more than just one thing. The best warriors, like Liala, Styx, Captain Debogande and Major Thakur, were far more than just brave and dangerous.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“Capability doesn't equal intent, Doctor. Do you want what she knows or not? Because if you keep looking at her like the caged lab rat, she'll keep looking at you like the evil bloody scientist with the big syringe.”
― Joel Shepherd, Crossover

“Populist politics only appeals to intuitive logic, because that which is intuitive can be comprehended by the masses.”
― Joel Shepherd, Ceephay Queen

“When civilisation declined, it was the women who always suffered most.”
― Joel Shepherd, Rando Splicer

“In times of conflict, everyone retreated to their most tribal positions.”
― Joel Shepherd, Rando Splicer

“It was the Cause. In the face of a Great Cause, the individual was always the first to suffer. The Great Cause consumed individuals as a Southern Plains tornado consumed trees. It did not matter that the Cause was in the name of humanity itself—any such mass ideology, even that conducted in the name of individual rights and freedoms, would sacrifice anyone and anything to further its own grand purpose.”
― Joel Shepherd, Crossover

“Conspiracy theories are an obvious manifestation of CNS. The individual buys into the narrative structure of deceptive governments because it allows the individual an illusion of control over uncontrollable events, allowing him to ‘take back’ and control the narrative from an evil government which in reality has no more control over the events in question than he does. It’s an empowerment narrative, feeding off the subconscious fear of disempowerment,”
― Joel Shepherd, 23 Years on Fire

“You stop asking questions, and you just... accept some smaller version of things. Of the truth.”
― Joel Shepherd, Qalea Drop

“There is an old joke the chah'nas used to say; they said that among friends, a trouble shared is a trouble halved… but that among tavalai, a trouble shared is a trouble multiplied, retold, translated into five hundred tongues and turned into opera.”
― Joel Shepherd, Renegade