38 quotes
Things done the hard way aren’t necessarily done better. Nor are they done badly because done the easy way. The essence of progress consists of finding ways of avoiding old-time difficulties.
Major Ingredients (2000)
I give up. I cannot argue with someone who casts aside the accepted rules of logic and invents ones of his own.
Major Ingredients (2000)
“What’s the matter with you? Got a bellyache or something?”
“No, sir. I’ve been thinking.”
“Does it hurt that much?”
Major Ingredients (2000)
One cannot analogize the non-existent.
Major Ingredients (2000)
“I thought—”
“Mr. McShane, I would advise to postpone thinking until you have accumulated sufficient facts to form a useful basis. That is the intelligent thing to do, is it not?”
Major Ingredients (2000)
“No mob is composed of men, as such. It is made up of a few ringleaders and a horde of stupid followers.” He patted his guns. “You can always tell a ringleader—invariably he is the first to open his mouth!”
Major Ingredients (2000)
By the standards of the dim past they were appallingly ugly; but by the standards of her especial planet and her especial era they were not ugly. They were merely an individualistic aspect of the same universal thing which is named Intelligence.
Major Ingredients (2000)
“Nuts to that! I consider myself a cut above these Kastans, having been conceived in holy wedlock.”
“So do we all. But we must conceal the fact for as long as seems expedient. Good manners is the art of pretending that one is not superior.”
Major Ingredients (2000)
The reaction showed that the audience had never encountered this argument before or concocted anything like it of their own accord. None were stupid enough to accept it as serious assertion of fact. All were sufficiently intelligent to recognize it as logical or pseudo-logical denial of something self-evident and demonstrably true.
Major Ingredients (2000)
Well, that is a valuable addition to the sum total of our knowledge. Our minds are now enriched by the thought that an anonymous individual may be presented with a futile object for an indefinable purpose when he reaches his unknown destination.
Major Ingredients (2000)
“What do you say to that?”
Giving a deep shrug, Taylor said, “That kind of political cynicism has been long out of date where I come from. I can’t help it if mentally you’re about ten millennia behind us.”
Major Ingredients (2000)
“Back at Terran H.Q.,” said Maxwell, “one is not shot at dawn for sabotage, treachery, assassination or any equally trifling misdeed. One is blindfolded and stood against the wall for not filling out forms, or for filling out the wrong ones, or for filling out the right ones with the wrong details.”
Major Ingredients (2000)
Yes or no? Yes meant military victory, power and fear. No meant—what? Well, no meant a display of reasonableness in lieu of stubbornness. No meant a considerable change of mind. It struck him suddenly that one must possess redoubtable force of character to throw away a long-nursed viewpoint and adopt a new one. It required moral courage. The weak and the faltering could never achieve it.
Major Ingredients (2000)
“Do you suppose that this other-life might be…might be…like us?”
“I see no reason why not,” declared Bvandt, after some thought. “We are by far the highest form in the known cosmos, therefore any other high form must be similar.”
“The logic of that is not evident.”
Major Ingredients (2000)
“The World Council,” Railton snorted. “All they’re interested in is exploration, discovery and trade. All they can think of is culture and cash. They’re completely devoid of any sense of peril.”
“Not being military officers,” Ashmore pointed out, “they can hardly be expected to exist in a state of perpetual apprehension.”
Major Ingredients (2000)
Nobody knew better than the Solarians that wars are not caused , declared or willingly fought by nations, planetary peoples or shape-groups, for these consist in the main of plain, ordinary folk who crave nothing more than to be left alone. The real culprits are power-drunken cliques of near-maniacs who by dint of one means or another have coerced the rest.
Major Ingredients (2000)
Given brawn and brains and enough time there’s always a way in or out. Escapees shot down as they bolted had chosen the wrong time and wrong place, or the right time and wrong place, or the right place at the wrong time. Or they’d neglected brawn in favor of brains, a common fault of the impatient. Or they’d neglected brains in favor of brawn, a fault of the reckless.
Major Ingredients (2000)
As for the causes, he listened to them with boredom. Only the strong know there is but one cause of war. All the other multitudinous reasons recorded in the history books were not real reasons at all. They were nothing but plausible pretexts. There was but one root-cause that persisted right back to the dim days of the jungle. When two monkeys want the same banana, that is war.
Major Ingredients (2000)