David Stuckey > David's Quotes

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Never tell a computer to forget it.”
― Larry Niven, A World Out of Time

“The State has a superfluity of testicles, Peersa said with no particular emphasis.”
― Larry Niven, A World Out of Time

“The firm of Strange had not been built on softness; what you stole from it, you were welcome to keep.”
― Keith Roberts, Pavane

“She remembered how one day she’d gone running to him with a shell, told him to listen and hear the waves inside. He’d taken time off from his endless making of money and driven her way up into the hills and found a quarry and dug a fossil out the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; she’d heard the same singing and he’d told her that was the noise the years made, all the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free. She kept the stone a long while after that; and when more time had passed and she knew the whispering and piping were only echoes of her blood she did’t care because she’d still heard what she heard, the sound of trapped eternities.”
― Keith Roberts, Pavane

“We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.”
― Che Guevara

“There was an ancient word, originating in one of the lost languages of Pre-Atomic Terra—sixtifor. It meant, the basic, fundamental, question. Rovard Javasan, he suspected, had just asked the sixtifor.”
― H Beam Piper

“Keep a government poor and weak and it’s your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it’s your master.”
― H. Beam Piper, The H. Beam Piper Megapack: 33 Classic Science Fiction Novels and Short Stories

“It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as Homo sapiens terra is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means.”
― H. Beam Piper, Space Viking

“these ideological cliques form in a government--or any other organization. Subordinates are always chosen for their agreement with the views of their superiors, and the extremists always get to the top and shove the moderates under or out.”
― H. Beam Piper, The Works of H. Beam Piper (27 books)

“What I object to is the way you're raiding the Sword-Worlds."

"You're crazy!" Basil Gorram exploded.

"Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between Lord Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. What do you mean, Lord Trask?”
― H. Beam Piper

“On Aditya," First Citizen Yaggo declared, "there are no classes, and on Aditya everybody works. 'From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.'"
"On Aditya," an elderly Counselor four places to the right of him said loudly to his neighbor, "they don't call them classes, they call them sociological categories, and they have nineteen of them. And on Aditya, they don't call them nonworkers, they call them occupational reservists, and they have more of them than we do."
"But of course, I was born a king," Ranulf said sadly and nobly. "I have a duty to my people."
"No, they don't vote at all," Lord Koreff was telling the Counselor on his left. "On Durendal, you have to pay taxes before you can vote."
"On Aditya the crime of taxation does not exist," the First Citizen told the Prime Minister.
"On Aditya," the Counselor four places down said to his neighbor, "there's nothing to tax. The state owns all the property, and if the Imperial Constitution and the Space Navy let them, the State would own all the people, too. Don't tell me about Aditya. First big-ship command I had was the old Invictus, 374, and she was based on Aditya for four years, and I'd sooner have spent that time in orbit around Niffelheim."...
"But if they don't have votes to sell, what do they live on?" a Counselor asked in bewilderment.
"The nobility supports them; the landowners, the trading barons, the industrial lords. The more nonworking adherents they have, the greater their prestige." And the more rifles they could muster when they quarreled with their fellow nobles, of course. "Beside, if we didn't do that, they'd turn brigand, and it costs less to support them than to have to hunt them out of the brush and hang them."
"On Aditya, brigandage does not exist."
"On Aditya, all the brigands belong to the Secret Police, only on Aditya they don't call them Secret Police, they call them Servants of the People, Ninth Category.”
― H. Beam Piper, Ministry of Disturbance

“Does the Convocation make the laws?" Erskyll asked.
Hozhet was perplexed. "Make laws, Lord Proconsul? Oh, no. We have laws."
There were planets, here and there through the Empire, where an attitude like that would have been distinctly beneficial; planets with elective parliaments, every member of which felt himself obligated to get as many laws enacted during his term of office as possible.”
― H. Beam Piper, A Slave Is A Slave

“It should belong to everybody. Let us call it the Commonwealth. That means something everybody owns in common."
"Something everybody owns, nobody owns," Mykhyl Eschkhaffar objected.
"Oh, no, Mykhyl; it will belong to everybody," Khreggor Chmidd told him earnestly. "But somebody will have to take care of it for everybody. That," he added complacently, "will be you and me and the rest of us here."
"I believe," Yakoop Zhannar said, almost smiling, "that this freedom is going to be a wonderful thing. For us.”
― H. Beam Piper, A Slave Is A Slave

“a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of.”
― H. Beam Piper, The Works of H. Beam Piper (27 books)

“The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.”
― Cordwainer Smith

“She is a cat," he thought. "That's all she is—a cat!"
But that was not how his mind saw her—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding.
Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?”
― Cordwainer Smith

“It was not the site of the earth which surprised him – it was the smell. .... This earth and air smelled alive. There was the odor of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. .... It was the wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance which no Norstrilian could understand. No wonder the descriptions of the earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated!”
― Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia

“It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium—metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of Old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the burn and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an air-carried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Chang nodded sagely. “My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up-and-out, and what we did there, but it did not matter. He said, ‘Airplanes were good enough for Confucius, and they are for me too.’ The old humbug!”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“Meeya Meefla, where”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

“She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.”
― Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith

“It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A man who bets on greed an dishonesty won't be wrong too often.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast

“Indian government seemed as furious over fish as fishermen – but principle of sacredness of all life did not apply to us; they wanted our heads.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“But, to tell the truth, a soldier doesn’t notice a war much more than a civilian does, except his own tiny piece of it and that just on the days it is happening.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“There can be circumstances when it’s just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers