Quotes from Peter F. Hamilton

I knew I'd get stick

Ian chuckled. "You know what the world's greatest oxymoron is?" "Happily married," Sid said wearily.

Formal address wrongness. Much sorriness. Greetings ritual observance.

Most people who have failed miserably in life itself have one last resort left available to them. They become politicians.

So government did what government always does when confronted with an opposition which can't be brought down by fair and legal means. It cheated.

Greetings, human. We come in peace. Take me to your leader so I may serve you.' 'What?' 'Fried or baked?' 'Uh—?' 'Serve, get it? That's a first-contact joke.

I'm an appropriate companion personality for a girl your age, young missy. We spent all night ransacking that library to see what I should be like. You got any idea what it's like watching eight million hours of Disney AVs?

war is the result of total irrationality combined with conflict of interest.

As if we didn't have enough weapons already. But that's human nature, we've always got to go one better, to increase the terror another notch.

killed fifteen men when I was in combat. Yeah, he was a nurse. Couldn't read the label on the medicine bottle.

Interpretation through the filters of ideology has always been one of our race's curses.

Funny how different life could be, so many things that make you take one route instead of another. If only we could live them all.

his reaction was a sign of civilization. Nobody reaches for a gun anymore, just for his lawyer.

It is the others you must convince, the ignorant masses, yet paradoxically, they are the ones hardest for you to reach. Theirs are the minds which, thanks to circumstance, have set and hardened against new concepts and ideas from an early age.

Is Vermillion damaged?' 'No.' He gave her an anxious grin. 'Not exactly. Just lost.' 'Lost?' It was possibly an even more worrying answer. How could you get lost flying to a star cluster that measured twenty thousand lightyears in diameter? It wasn't as if you could lose sight of something of that magnitude. 'That's ridiculous.' 'The captain will explain. Let's get you to the bridge.

Chain of command was always a nominal concept in the division, you trusted people to do their job right.

The human race, for all our facets and our institutional stupidity, is something I believe in. I admire our diversity, our stubbornness. The dynamic of conflict is one of our greatest traits.

Thoale alone knows why suicides are so fond of jumping off cliffs and bridges; they wouldn't if they knew what that trip's like.

That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain.

Don't worry. The chaps train for civil disobedience suppression. We'll crack a few heads, chuck some of the would-be revolutionaries in jail, and the rest will slink off back to their hovels and drink themselves stupid all night. And if worse comes to worst, well, we've got all the guns, haven't we?

The dead hand of society's inertia and the financial interest of the elite minority hold us back as a species. They govern us so they can continue to govern us.

Another religious fanatic to whom facts and reality took second place to dogma.

Beyond them, sat Soi Hon, who was a veteran of early-twenty-first century bush wars, an ecological agitator, he called himself. Annette gathered his battles hadn't been fought along national lines, but rather corporate ones.

So what the hell do you want us to do, then?" Delvan asked. "Make that cost exorbitant," Soi Hon said. "Such people always assign a value to everything in monetary terms. We might not be able to defeat them on Mortonridge, but we can certainly prevent any further Liberation campaigns after this one.