Quotes from S.M. Stirling

Stress" is mostly the result of not being allowed to kill some asshole you really want to slice and dice.

Being ignorant is truly bliss compared to being misinformed, especially if you're aware of the depths of your own ignorance. As Mother says, it isn't what you don't know that will kill you, it's what you think you know that just isn't so.

Because those events are so real that they cast their shadow forward and backwards through all time, whenever men think of these matters at all. Even if they are mired in ignorace, they will see...fragments of the Truth, as men imprisoned in a cave see shadows cast by the sun. Likewise, all men derive their moral intuitions from God; how not? There is no other source, just as there is no other way to make a wheel than to make it round.

Truth is a ladder of many rungs, and that from each we gain a new perspective??

Sandra was fond of an old Russian saying: When a man causes you a problem, remember: no man, no problem.

Grief is the tribute we pay the dead," she said, matter-of-fact sympathy in her voice. "But they don't ask more than we can afford to give. They've never really gone from us, you know, those we love; they're part of our story, and we of theirs.

Be your own judge. But commit no trespass, remembering that where another's liberty begins your own inevitably meets its boundary.

Likes to fight, does he?" Sandra said thoughtfully. "Oh, yeah. He says there are only two reasons to fight." "Which are?" "Joy and death." Her mother's brows went up. "Joy in death?" "No, no... For joy, to stretch yourself with a friend; or death, to kill as quickly as you can. Nothing in between.

There may be a worse form of government than theocracy in the long run, but offhand I can't think of any.

It doesn't stop being magic because you can you explain it, Father.

God is the greatest of artists! How good of Him to give us this world, and the change to imitate Him by bettering it. Wryly: If only we did not mar it, and ourselves, so often!

God is no respecter of either persons or names - Dieu or Gott or Kyrie or Adonai or Wakantanka. He is the Great Spirit whose pity we ask.

Sure it is that They have many faces. All the shapes the Divine shows us are true; and none are all the Truth.

Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks.

But then they were males, and therefore idiots about some things.

It was hard, to be stripped of the cold comforts of her simple atheistic faith in middle-age. The more so as the evidence seemed to lead to the conclusion that all the religions were true, including the ones that flatly contradicted each other.

Ah, well, old girl, remember the definition of an Anglo-Saxon: A German who's forgotten his grandmother was Welsh.

Dennis says) "Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?" "Yes," Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus...

He smiled, looking into the flames. "He used to sleep on the foot of my bed, bad breath and gas and all, and I even took him hunting." "It's odd to take a dog hunting?" "Max? Yeah, sort of like taking along a brass band. He saved a lot of deer from death.

and he kills without fear, or anger, or hate, with regret even, simply because its necessary. That's rare, and it's rare still among the really first-rate. God help the enemy that finally frightens him or makes him mad.

Against fashion, even tyrants struggle in vain, she thought.

A fighter should not think only of his shete, just because he has a shete in his hand. Everything is a weapon in the warrior's mind.