Quotes from Joel Shepherd

Equality. It was the oldest of human ideals. And those who forgot their past were doomed to forget why it had become such a grand ideal in the first place.

Very few things are wise, Lisbeth Debogande. Least frequently those things that are loudly pronounced to be so. The true question is whether they are necessary

The problem with sentient AIs, Kaspowitz said often, was that you could never trust anything they said as genuine. All was calculation for effect.

Erik was always amazed how exhausting it was to sit on your ass and not move.

When meeting with powerful people about things that matter,' he'd said, 'never play yourself down.

I'm sick of happy bullshit that means nothing. Vacuous words for vacuous minds.

Better than Hope," said Trace. "What the fuck is Hope? Hope for what? An icecream? A quick death?" Bemusement on the faces of several marines. "Uh, isn't that kind of the point?" Arime asked. "That Hope can mean anything you want it to?" "It means nothing," Trace said flatly. "I'm sick of happy bullshit that means nothing. Vacuous words for vacuous minds.

never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity'.

Fear was debilitating, and she hated it — the thudding heart, the endless, breathless tension. She recalled what Major Thakur had said, that those who feared most often failed on the climb, or died. Fear was sometimes useful, but when the thing you feared was present in everything around you, and prevented you from dealing with your situation practically, it became a pointless distraction.

It was enough to make a person suspicious. Spending too much time around Styx could do that to anyone.

the shadow person', the light breath of wind caused by the simultaneous presence and absence of a person who had never died nor entirely departed, just faded into melancholy abstraction.

And from those ancestors, you will find a greatness buried deep within yourself that you did not even know existed." "You think?" Skah asked, breathlessly. "I know," said the croma.

A people well informed cannot be enslaved.

He had a smart crew, and if he spoke too much, they'd shut up and listen to him instead of volunteering their own very useful opinions. 'Good leaders lead,' Pantillo had told Erik once. 'Great leaders listen.

being psychologically incapable of understanding the concept of moral problems,

The technology itself was blameless. The people who used it, sometimes less so.

don't look too far ahead, just solve the next problem, then the next, then the next. Eventually you'll either run out of problems, or one of them will kill you. In either case, a solution.

Croma staff officers, it seemed, liked to make things unnecessarily complicated just as human ones did.

The problem with looking at so much history from such a distance is that everything gets so crowded. Things are complicated in every period — you step back too far to get a generalised picture and you lose all the important, deciding details. Zoom in too far to get the detail and you'll get lost in complexity and never find your way out.

Join the Fleet, travel the galaxy, meet interesting new people and kill them.

All species had some degree of xenophobia hardwired into their brains, even toward aliens they'd come to like. But just as one couldn't be brave in the absence of fear, neither could one be tolerant in the absence of genuine difference.

She'd come to find civil administration more interesting than war. It's certainly more complicated.

There is a law of exponential increase in efficiency that applies to all lifeforms that cluster, synthetic or organic. It is the reason your ancestors found it more productive to move to cities than live in small groups. Humanity found a mathematical law to benefit from, and they've been exploiting that law ever since,