Isabel Brady

“You know, that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.” “Do you think it will work?” “I’m sure it will. And let’s promote him to captain, too, just to make certain.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Men are slower to act from principle than self-interest, and far slower to act on principle than jealousy or revenge.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Demon in White

“History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars