They had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire, they can either keep you warm or burn you to death; depending on how they’re used.
“You lied.”
“I exaggerated”
He has never done a truly bad thing in his life.
“You have succeeded in making me lose my temper!”
“Is that bad?”
“This makes me very angry, very angry indeed.”
You’ve done some bad things, but I’m really, really upset right now. So much so that, honestly, I don’t trust myself. And if you attack me or I attack you… I will hurt you. I’ll hurt you worse than you’ve ever been hurt in your whole life. I can carve you up as soon as look at you. I can break you, boil you, freeze you. I can do things you can’t imagine. Things I can’t imagine, until I have to. And then I’ll improvise.
“All of that’s true, and no doubt that would be enough from their viewpoint, but they want her to hurt, Captain McKeon. They want to know that before they kill her they’ve done the cruelest thing they possibly can to her.”
Goodbye, cruel world. Goodbye, cruel lamp. Goodbye, cruel velvet drapes, lined with what would appear to be some kind of cruel muslin. And the cute little pom-pom pull ropes, cruel though they may be…
KIRK: It’s sad. Think what we could have done with his knowledge. But the price was just too high.
MCCOY: I think I know how he felt, Jim. There’s a line from Shakespeare.
KIRK: Yes, Bones, I remember it. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.
SPOCK: Indeed, Captain.
Circling Alpha Centauri A near the middle of those asteroids called the Serpent Swarm, it was originally a chondritic body with a sideritic component giving it more structural strength than is usual for that kind. A rough cylinder, about 50 kilometers in length and 20 in diameter, it rotated on its long axis in a bit over ten hours; and at the epoch when humans arrived, that axis happened to be almost normal to the orbital plane.
“It might be hard to gauge its size from this distance. That cylinder is about eighty-one hundred kilometers across. If it helps you visualize it, you could drop mars into that can, and then tuck Luna and Europa on top.”
The Ramans do everything in threes.
Sandpeople always ride single file to hide their numbers.
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” – which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
I talk about taking the long view and transcending the everyday concerns that bog us down. About how we are children reaching across the sandbox with whatever we have to offer, to whoever shows up.
In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and Space tells Matter how to move.
The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted, and parked itself neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber of Law.
.
His command was fourteen days, sixteen hours, and thirty-three minutes (base-time reckoning) out of Cerberus. Of course, given relativity’s input into things, that worked out to only ten days, twenty-two hours, and some change for Heathrow and his crew, which seemed like a particularly dirty trick. The rest of the universe got to enjoy the full fourteen days between the time he touched base with two different groups of sourpuss, pain-in-the-butt types, while his people got cheated out of almost three whole days.
Oh, well. No one had ever said the universe was fair.
With every disaster, I have come to believe for my own personal reasons, comes a compensation, a certain balancing of the accounts - not spread evenly about but clumped here and there, of benefit to very few.
Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.