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You thought you could treat me the way you did everybody else and beat me up for being smarter than you. Because you’ve always been the big king of the class, haven’t you, Your Majesty? Well, you’re not anymore. You were never anything but the plain old class bully, and now you’re the ex-bully. And the only reason people are bullies is because they’re stupid.

— John Barnes Orbital Resonance (1991)

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More quotes by John Barnes

Papa always says there’s room for everyone, but some people certainly take theirs up without making it interesting.

Orbital Resonance (1991)

The only thing Carla has ever learned to like about dealing with power is how easy it is to embarrass people who have it.

Mother of Storms (1994)

I burst into tears. It’s the best defense ever found against well-meaning people who are telling you something stupid “for your own good.”

Orbital Resonance (1991)

Silence, like all good things, was at its best and costliest when absolutely pure, and it never paid to skimp on it.

The Lost Princess Man (2009)

How he must have been astonished to see people behaving decently when what they believed was absolute anathema to him.

A Million Open Doors (1992)

All John Barnes quotes →

Attribution

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