H. Paul Honsinger > Quotes

“A fair fight comes from poor planning. Your goal is an unfair fight. You want to use every trick, artifice, and deceit possible to make every fight an outrageously unfair contest tilted completely in your favor, every time. If you are above using surprise, guile, stealth, and misdirection in battle, you are too noble to be in the Navy. Consider a career in education.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“You learn lots of interesting things when you take the time to find the answers to the questions your mind generates because some part of your mind has decided that those are the questions that you need to have answered.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“Anyone who does not believe cats have shit lists has never lived with a cat.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“You have set yourself back, but not irreparably, not permanently. You are going through a period of hardship. But you have an opportunity to overcome that hardship and, given time, to leave it behind and go forward almost as though it did not happen.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“sawed-off shotguns, machine pistols, and at least two battle axes. Although Max was not himself very good with a battle ax, he liked them a lot. There”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“nothing tends to destroy productive discussion any faster than folks assuming that differences of opinion are the result of the other guy being stupid or misinformed or ill-intentioned, rather than being a consequence of differences in philosophy or values.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“The Fermi Paradox?” “Yes. It’s named after Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist who helped build the first fission reactor, the first fission weapon, and many other seminal contributions to physics that are far beyond my limited understanding of the field. It is said that after discussing alien visitation during a walk with a few colleagues, he sat down to lunch with them and suddenly asked, ‘Where are they?’ One of the other diners responded, ‘Who, Doctor Fermi? Where are who?’ He replied, ‘The extraterrestrials. Where are they? They should be here by now.’ He then proceeded to do some calculations showing that, given the age of the galaxy and the number of stars in it, the Earth should have been visited many times over. And as I understand the time line of such things, it was a good point.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“experiencing nightmares, disturbed sleep, exaggerated startle responses, emotional volatility, pain in the extremities, an irrational need to avoid sitting with your back to any room with people in it, difficulty trusting others, and profound feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“modern cognitive theory that says people tend to perceive reality in light of preexisting expectations and will ignore large amounts of contrary data before finally changing their minds.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“His life had purpose. All men—all humans—need that. They need it like they need air.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Brothers in Valor

“You need to understand that sometimes things can be so totally fucked up that all you can hope for is to find a way stay in the fight just a little while longer. Entire goddamn wars have been won just because some grim, stubborn son of a bitch had enough grit in his gizzard and iron in his backbone to keep fighting for just a little while longer. And, goddamn it, if that’s all you’ve fucking got, then that’s what you fucking do. Maybe you can’t see a road out of the valley of the shadow of death, but so long as you’ve got life in your body and defiance in your heart, you have not been beaten.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Deadly Nightshade

“Max smiled, his heart warmed by that unique form of contentment that comes from the knowledge that a good friend or loved one is happy.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Brothers in Valor

“Clouseau stretched invitingly, which resulted in a brief scratch behind the ears and under the chin from Finnegan. Goldman was too wrapped up in his console to notice. Clouseau looked at him with obvious irritation. Goldman was now on the cat’s shit list. Anyone who does not believe cats have shit lists has never lived with a cat.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“Punishment should follow as a consequence for a wrongful choice—for a malicious and evil exercise of the will. If you take away a man’s choice and deprive him of his will, then punishment is unjust, and executing him would be a travesty of justice.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“in war, nothing speaks more loudly than victory.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Brothers in Valor

“Don’t get yourself killed:  that’s your first priority.  Careful analysis of after-action reports demonstrates that, on most mission types, dead personnel have a very low success rate.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Deadly Nightshade

“Step one:  avoid being killed.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Deadly Nightshade

“the general consensus of considered tactical opinion is that it is better to be crazy than dead.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Brothers in Valor

“Rival of Ares? Max thought bitterly. Out here, Ares has no rival. Men serve no god but him.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“post-traumatic stress disorder, which, at its root, is an anxiety disorder. Although I am generally handling it well, part of my mind fears recurrence of these experiences and seeks to protect me from them by being constantly on guard with the fight-or-flight response set to a hair trigger. You call this ‘hypervigilance,’ which you described to me as the mind’s effort to keep me alive in a dangerous environment by monitoring every aspect of that environment very carefully. But it’s a strain on the mind and the body,”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“No man with an inkling of self-respect can abide for a moment the feeling that he is a failure. It is extremely destructive of self-esteem and, as we all know, self-esteem is the foundation of mental health.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“Know the enemy and know yourself, and in a thousand battles you will never be in peril.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“One: Never, ever hurry. If you do something fast once, people will expect you to do it that fast every other time. Two: Never be the first person to do anything. To err is human, but to err in a way no one has erred before makes people question your judgment. Three: There is no mistake that cannot be papered over by enough of the right kind of documentation. Once the dust settles, it’s not what you do, but what you say about what you did, that matters.” The”
― H. Paul Honsinger, For Honor We Stand

“whole they simply looked for items in one”
― H. Paul Honsinger, To Honor You Call Us

“When you are in the enemy’s rear, he is also in yours.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Brothers in Valor

“Without men to give her life, the Cumberland was already dead.”
― H. Paul Honsinger, Brothers in Valor