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The immediate teaching of philosophers may be gentle, but the theory behind their teaching is without compunction—and that’s why so much bloodshed and misery has always attended the paths of their followers, who claim to live by those teachings. More blood’s been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man.

— 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)

“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.”

Tactics of Mistake (1971)

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Attribution

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.