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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3fa7309 | You think he may be a triple agent?" "It wouldn't be the first time something like that had happened. The one thing you know about someone who's willing to compromise his allies is that he's willing to compromise his allies." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 585584b | The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 7f73ecf | The sad fact of the human species that High Consul Duarte understood so well was that you could never overcome tribalism and jingoism with an argument. Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument. And so, instead of presenting a logical plan for why humanity needed to give up the old national and cultural divides and become a single unified species, the high consul ob.. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 49879e1 | and a familiar voice was coming from the terminal, "Going to be monitoring anything we fucking say. If you wanted to discuss menstruation at great length and detail, this is probably our best chance. He's always been squeamish about women. And no one likes a Peeping Tom, even if he is Prime Minister." | chrisjen-avasarala | James S.A. Corey | |
| 72d4f1b | Everything changed, and it went right on changing. A terrible thought when things were good, a comforting one now. Whatever happened, she could be certain that things wouldn't stay the way they were now. And if she stayed smart and clever and lucky, she'd be able to affect how the next change came. Or take advantage of it. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| e103140 | You've got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 52e5ef4 | I believe there is a dignity in consequences, Captain. I think there's a kind of truth in them, and I try to cultivate a profound respect for truth. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6f2393a | Insurgencies are historically nearly impossible to eradicate, for a few very simple reasons. The insurgents don't wear uniforms. They look just like the innocent populace. And, they're the friends and family of that populace. This means that every insurgent killed tends to increase recruiting for the insurgency. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 43b838c | He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 52b5ff5 | Also, Nathan, if you're listening, and I assume you are, I'm the best and only friend you've got. Give her permission to share what she has, or I swear to God I'll have you turning tricks out of a prefab shed on the side of the highway. I'm trying to save humanity here. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| faad53b | It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| db5e261 | It's herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory. | herding-kittens kittens libertarian neo-libertarian property | James S.A. Corey | |
| 7e64f05 | There was no reason to think she would survive this. So she was surprised to notice that she was happy. Not the powerful, irrational, and dangerous joy of a euphoric attack, but a kind of pleasure and release all the same. At first, she thought it was because there wasn't anyone there with her, guarding her, judging her. And that, she decided, was part of it. But more than that, she was simply doing what needed to be done without having to .. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| eb24103 | Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option. When you can't think of a good rebuttal for your opponent's argument, you can always punch them in the face. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| c3efc59 | You're making a mistake, shithead," Avasarala said, and dropped the connection." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 9e5ecc6 | Well, that and a hundred or so gunships," Havelock said. "From what I hear," Miller said, "if you clap your hands and say you believe, they can't shoot you." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 9261f43 | Sometimes you don't get redeemed... Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That's your happy ending. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 1db57c3 | He looked like a kid who just realized he'd jumped in the deep end of the pool and was trying to figure out whether he should embarrass himself by shouting for help or drown with a little dignity. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d08e2d3 | All of them do what they think is right, and tell themselves that they're moral people with the strength to do the necessary things, however terrible they seem at the time. Every atrocity that has been done to us had someone behind it who thought what they did was justified. And | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5453f11 | Meditating deeply so that she could really, clearly experience being angry and lonesome and hurt and horror-struck never seemed as good as a strong gin and tonic and another hour of work. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 0bc0b65 | Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies' gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design. | evolution | James S.A. Corey | |
| 87d0cae | What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| bf06443 | See, this is why I can't ever be in command," she said. "Don't like making tough calls with incomplete information?" "More I'm not suicidally irresponsible," she replied," | James S.A. Corey | ||
| b48fb29 | Duty isn't a buffet where you pick what you want and ignore the rest. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 410f778 | She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. "Anything you can do, I can do better." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 9a20248 | But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he'd just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 04b8454 | The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead. | willful-ignorance | James S.A. Corey | |
| ebf7793 | It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d380fae | Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he'd done was justified by his goal in doing it. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5d635bc | That seemed to be the human pattern--reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| c831189 | I don't kill children," she said. "Not even when it's the right thing to do." | death killing-children right-thing | James S.A. Corey | |
| e21eec8 | In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 70e1828 | Maybe it was a cumulative process, like smoking cigarettes. One didn't do much. Five didn't do much more. Every emotion he'd shut down, every human contact he'd spurned, every love and friendship and moment of compassion from which he'd turned had taken him a degree away from himself. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 3b9e01d | You don't have a right thing, friend," Miller said. "You've got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 7546fb0 | Alex leaned forward, grabbing Basia's hands in his own. "It's still on you. I will never live down not being the person my wife needed after she spent twenty years waitin' for me. I can never make that right. Don't go feelin' sorry for yourself. You fucked up. You failed the people you love. They're payin' the price for it right now and you demean them every second you don't own that shit." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6752800 | That seemed to be the human pattern--reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden's experience, humanity's drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other. | human-nature solitude-and-companionship | James S.A. Corey | |
| 126d087 | You could never demand intimacy -- you could only volunteer it. | Elizabeth A. Lynn | ||
| 5671c40 | If you wish to view this as a cautionary tale, be my guest. | evolution microbes pollution | Philip C. Plait | |
| 86f0e78 | To the Greeks, the word "character" first referred to the stamp upon a coin. By extension, man was the coin, and the character trait was the stamp imprinted upon him. To them, that trait, for example bravery, was a share of something all mankind had, rather than means of distinguishing one from the whole." | Edith Hamilton | ||
| 0990e7f | It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the gods. | Edith Hamilton | ||
| 148ee00 | The Greeks were the first people in the world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games; athletic contests of every description: races--horse-, boat-, foot-, torch-races; contests in music, where one side out-sung the other; in dancing--on greased skins sometimes to display a nice skill of foot and balance of body; games where men leaped in and out of flying chariots; games so many one g.. | Edith Hamilton | ||
| aa17d00 | Thor was probably the most important god of late paganism, as is suggested by the presentation in medieval Scandinavian sources of the conversion as a struggle between Thor and Christ. | John Lindow | ||
| d287edd | The awful glimpse down into the abyss of an existence without him had so staggered and appalled her heart that she felt she could never be quite the same again. However, it had opened her eyes to the fact that right down in the depths of her own heart she really had but one passionate desire, not for the things which the Shepherd had promised, but for himself. All she wanted was to be allowed to follow him forever. | Hannah Hurnard | ||
| c433a7f | From bitter experience she knew that pictures thrown on the screen of her imagination could seem much more unnerving and terrible than the actual facts. | Hannah Hurnard |