Richard Phillips > Quotes

“This world will try to beat you down. Only laughter can counteract that. Laughter is ammunition. Resupply often.”
― Richard Phillips, Wormhole

“World War II acronym, SNAFU. Situation normal, all fucked up.”
― Richard Phillips, Wormhole

“Your journey will proceed faster with a brief delay.’ In other words, don’t go off half-cocked, but don’t wait until the other fellow shoots you either.” A”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“In another building, I was shown his [Mr Brunel's] manufactory of shoes, which, like the other, is full of ingenuity, and, in regard to subdivision of labour, brings this fabric on a level with the oft-admired manufactory of pins. Every step in it is effected by the most elegant and precise machinery; while as each operation is performed by one hand, so each shoe passes through twenty-five hands, who complete from the hide, as supplied by the currier, a hundred pair of strong and well-finished shoes per day. All the details are performed by ingenious applications of the mechanic powers, and all the parts are characterized by precision, uniformity, and accuracy. As each man performs but one step in the process, which implies no knowledge of what is done by those who go before or follow him, so the persons employed are not shoemakers, but wounded soldiers, who are able to learn their respective duties in a few hours. The contract at which these shoes are delivered to government is 6s. 6d. per pair, being at least 2s. less than what was paid previously for an unequal and cobbled article.

While, however, we admire these triumphs of mechanics, and congratulate society on the prospect of enjoying more luxuries at less cost of human labour, it ought not to be forgotten, that the general good in such cases is productive of great partial evils, against which a paternal government ought to provide. No race of workmen being proverbially more industrious than shoemakers, it is altogether unreasonable, that so large a portion of valuable members of society should be injured by improvements which have the ultimate effect of benefiting the whole.”
― Richard Phillips, A Morning's Walk from London to Kew

“Sometimes life drives you to do entirely new things, things you never believed you could do.”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“Dark echo chambers did that to you, squeezed those suppressed childhood nightmares from under your bed into your present.”
― Richard Phillips, Dead Wrong

“Leaning back in the couch, she let her mind relax. Think, Heather. Think. She visualized a grid containing the origin of a coordinate system. A perpendicular set of lines labeled “x axis” and “y axis” appeared to float before her. She drew a single point located right three ticks and up four ticks from the origin on the grid, then followed up with another point, connecting the two with a line. It was there, floating perfectly in the air before her. Right, she thought. She added another dimension to the grid to form a cube, and into this cube she drew spheres, ellipsoids, cubes, and pyramids. It was easy. The equations came faster and faster, as if she had fumbled around and found a switch in the dark. A part of her mind turned on, big time. Adding a fourth dimension was easy. She took her three-dimensional grid cube, shrank it to the size of a pinhead, then formed a line of these cubes. Five dimensions formed from a plane of the 3D grid cubes. Six: a cube made of cubes. Seven dimensions: a line made of the new cube of cubes. On and on the mental sequence spun from her mind. Easy. Oh so easy. She no longer had to think about the equations that represented the shapes. Merely visualizing the shape brought the corresponding equations to her mind. She didn’t have to solve them; she just knew them. It was beautiful beyond her wildest imaginings.”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“It was like the engineer had broken some code of the sea that said you must assist pirates in taking over your ship.”
― Richard Phillips, A Captain's Duty: The true story that inspired the major film, Captain Phillips

“A fresh lightning tree sprouted in the distance as Mother Nature painted the sky in rapid strokes, strobed the results, and then erased her magnificent creation, leaving its after-image burned into Rolf’s retinas. So beautiful. So fleeting. Like life itself.”
― Richard Phillips, Once Dead

“That which you don’t understand, you fear. That which you fear, you hate.”
― Richard Phillips, Wormhole

“The great American government, with its spirit of free enterprise, had imposed communism on the Native Peoples, and like the system the Bolsheviks had imposed on the Soviet Union, it had yielded the same harvest. The once-proud native people learned to accept government handouts, then to rely upon them. The subsequent loss of pride, self-reliance, and initiative led inevitably to the current plague of alcoholism, obesity, and hopelessness infecting modern tribal societies.”
― Richard Phillips, Wormhole

“Every basketball wimp needs a lesson, and you seem to think you’re somewhere above your true station in life.”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“I finished reviewing all the data we got on our last trip out to the ship. As much as I hate to admit it, it turns out Mark is right. We do need to build both a subspace receiver and a subspace transmitter.” “I keep telling you to listen when I speak,” Mark said. “It’s not that we need it to receive a signal. But we’re going to want to put data on remote network lines, not just receive. For that we’ll need a focused subspace wave packet that will induce a signal in normal space. You can almost think of it as Faraday’s induction principle applied across a subspace to normal space interface.”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“Amateurs beat the bush, seeking to frighten hiding game into the open. Even when this tactic worked, the amateur found himself poorly prepared and poorly positioned for the kill shot. The professional studied his prey, learned its patterns, and positioned”
― Richard Phillips, Once Dead

“Morning plus coffee equals comfort, or some nonsensical equation.”
― Richard Phillips, Immune

“For that we’ll need a focused subspace wave packet that will induce a signal in normal space. You can almost think of it as Faraday’s induction principle applied across a subspace to normal space interface.”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“As in combat, the key to this game was to get inside your opponent’s decision cycle, making him react to what you were doing, rather than the reverse.”
― Richard Phillips, Once Dead

“(Without the merchant marine, there is no Walmart.)”
― Richard Phillips, A Captain's Duty

“It was easy. The equations came faster and faster, as if she had fumbled around and found a switch in the dark. A part of her mind turned on, big time. Adding a fourth dimension was easy. She took her three-dimensional grid cube, shrank it to the size of a pinhead, then formed a line of these cubes. Five dimensions formed from a plane of the 3D grid cubes. Six: a cube made of cubes. Seven dimensions: a line made of the new cube of cubes. On and on the mental sequence spun from her mind. Easy. Oh so easy.”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“As great as the all-volunteer force had been under Ronald Reagan, that force had always been a mighty war ax, something designed to smite the country’s opponents with overwhelming combat power, rapidly destroying all resistance before being returned to the shed to be sharpened and hung back on the wall to await its next use. For years now, this awesome force had been used like a hatchet, thousands of small strokes steadily dulling its blade, no downtime allotted for resharpening. A new political philosophy for the use of America’s military had emerged in Washington, a violation of the Powell Doctrine that Jack called the “Strategy of Underwhelming Combat Power,” a term that yielded the unfortunate abbreviation “SUC”
― Richard Phillips, Immune

“Things look much brighter in the morning.”
― Richard Phillips, Immune

“site”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“This world will try to beat you down. Laughter is ammunition. Resupply often.’ ”
― Richard Phillips, Once Dead

“Don’t trust anyone, not even your best friends. Love them, but never trust them completely. At critical times, they can be influenced to do things you don’t want.”
― Richard Phillips, Wormhole

“degrees Kelvin,”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“were denied direct participation in the government, forced to rely on wit and wile to influence the men who wielded raw power.”
― Richard Phillips, Mark of Fire

“Music thundered in Raul's head, not that pussy stuff he'd been forced to endure in his former life either. This was pure Nickelback.”
― Richard Phillips

“scrambled to respond. Ms. Gorsky’s meaty hand”
― Richard Phillips, The Second Ship

“Ah,” he said. “If you’d been born a man, you’d be a force to reshape the world.” “Only a woman can do that.”
― Richard Phillips, Mark of Fire

“In that world, the line between friends and enemies was loosely drawn based only on your current interest.”
― Richard Phillips, Dead Wrong