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“You don’t quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way,” said Cletus. “To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It’s what he doesn’t have that counts.”

— Gordon R. Dickson Tactics of Mistake (1971)

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More quotes by Gordon R. Dickson

In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth.

Necromancer (1962)

Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?

Dorsai! (1960)

With the situation fully and correctly understood, it becomes entirely reasonable that the very small fraction of a second preceding a violent death could be a trigger to speculative thought.

Necromancer (1962)

Blunt nodded slowly, like an old man. It was not clear whether he had understood and was agreeing, or whether he had given up the attempt to understand and was merely being agreeable.

Necromancer (1962)

Even as she lay dreaming these dreams, however, a sane part of her mind was still on duty. Realistically, she knew that what she was thinking was nonsense.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gordon R. Dickson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.