Gravity is a harsh mistress.
Hey, if you didn’t want to get your hands dirty, you should’ve stayed off the committee in the first place. We’re probably sending people off to get killed. Yeah that’s right, making decisions like that is what being in charge is all about, either grow up and do it or get out!
No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.
Regret is a silly, useless thing. i might as well pine for the rings our ancestors were said to have abandoned, simply because those toroids were tainted with sin.
Oh, how many things the legends say those rings once let us do! To run before the wind, as fleet as any urs. To swim like qheuens and walk beneath the sea. To touch and handle the world at all levels of its grainy texture. Above all, to face this dire, dread-filled universe with a self-centered confidence that was utterly, biologically serene. No uncertainty to plague our complex community of selves. Only the towering egotism of a central, confident “I.”
I had taken a partner once before-but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.
“I guess what I’m sayin’ is, if you want to give Jules a job, be very careful.”
“Why be careful?” Marnes asked.
Marck gazed up at the confusion of pipes and wires overhead. “'Cause she’ll damn well do it. Even if you don’t really expect her to.”
Jules Bashir died in that hospital because you couldn’t live with the shame of having a son who didn’t measure up.
John Valuk is dead, he fell on his head.
What did I want? I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur - I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be - and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
Magenta: I ask for nothing, master.
Dr. Frank-N-Furter: And you shall receive it. IN ABUNDANCE!
You don’t pay him? Are you sure you aren’t evil?
“Let’s get sushi… and not pay!”
“Is it really worth the price?”
“I pay it gladly.”
“This is the building where our uncle lived, where our father killed him.”
“They’re tearing it down. Good.”
“They are not tearing it down, not anymore. I bought the building. And that one… and that one.”
When there’s nothing else you can do, breathe slower. There’s no way it can hurt, and it might help.
“Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”
Sometimes an insect will evolve to mimic its predator. A fly can look like a spider, a caterpillar can look like a snake. The Judas evolved to mimic its predator… us.
Being too ignorant to worry about trouble had fueled a lot of human enterprises.
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.
The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival–a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known.