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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But sometimes, helping people meant telling them things they didn't wish to hear.”
― Joel Shepherd, Homecoming

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

“It was enough to make a person suspicious. Spending too much time around Styx could do that to anyone.”
― Joel Shepherd, Rando Splicer

“Equality. It was the oldest of human ideals. And those who forgot their past were doomed to forget why it had become such a grand ideal in the first place.”
― Joel Shepherd, Crossover