David Stuckey

“Math is hard work and it occupies your mind—and it doesn’t hurt to learn all you can of it, no matter what rank you are; everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“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

“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

“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