And–if you got away–you could tell people where I’ve gone. Who took me, and when. All it takes is a few minutes of nerve, and that’s free. We make it ourselves, out of ourselves.
The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
“Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”
"What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue.
Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer."
Zathras is used to being beast of burden to other people’s needs. Very sad life… probably have very sad death, but at least there is symmetry.
“Excellence, he is known as the Mule. He is spoken of little, in a factual sense, but I have gathered the scraps and fragments of knowledge and winnowed out the most probable of them. He is apparently a man of neither birth nor standing. His father, unknown. His mother, dead in childbirth. His upbringing, that of a vagabond. His education, that of the tramp worlds, and the backwash alleys of space. He has no name other than that of the Mule, a name reportedly applied by himself to himself, and signifying, by popular explanation, his immense physical strength, and stubbornness of purpose.”
Jane 23 tried to find good words, but it was hard.
Barbarella: That could lead to - archaic insecurity and…
President: And war.
Barbarella: You mean, selfish competition and…
President: I mean, war. Bloody conflict between entire tribes.
“Obviously, I can’t prevent you from sailing your entire fleet into an even worse disaster than Sandra Crandall’s. I do warn you, however, that this entire exchange has been recorded and will be provided—at no charge—to the prosecution at the court-martial I’m sure you’ll be facing, should you happen to be one of the survivors of the fresh debacle the Solarian Navy is about to experience. I repeat my original warning. If the forces under your command cross the hyper limit of this star system, you will be engaged and destroyed and a state of war will exist between the Solarian League and the Star Empire of Manticore and its allies."
War were declared.
That’s just Daisy, firing off a warning shot.
He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.
“The mere thought,” growled Mr. Prosser, “hadn’t even begun to speculate,” he continued, settling himself back, “about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.”
“You know,” Lecter continued, “I’ve studied our dossier on Byng until my eyes ache, and I still can’t figure out how much of him is bluster, how much is raw arrogance, and how much of it is simply sheer stupidity.”
“I thought the purpose of filing these reports was to provide accurate intelligence!”
“Vir, intelligence has nothing to do with politics!”
Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That’s the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they’re dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it’s good enough for me. Bango, dead.
Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
The crossbows twanged like harps of death.
Before the sound had fully registered, she was running. Knees pumping, teeth gritted, she sprinted toward the boulders leading up to the opaque green dome behind her.