Home > Work > Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2)
1 " I could do such things, what they are I yet know not, but they would be the terror of the Earth. "
― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2)
2 " This is why the people who end up in authority are generally not those focused on whatever the purpose of the community is, but those who are focused on achieving positions of authority. This is why you have career politicians, why administrators end up pulling ten times the salary of a surgeon or an academic under their administration, why performing well in an exam or a test is not actually the same as being good at the thing the exam is supposed to be testing. Because the metagame outweighs the game. "
3 " You think you’re imposing order by tightening the vice, cracking down, police on the streets, curfews and stop-and-search and let’s-see-your-ID. Except, you look at any place and time when that’s been instituted, you tell me whether history records those as havens of peace and stability. You show me when top-down imposition of order has done anything except fan the flames. "
4 " Dictators don’t make the trains run on time, Rufus. They run down the rail networks because they travel in private planes. "
5 " He suggested, he denied, he made outrageous statements that contained so many layers of nested fabrications that you couldn’t ever unpick them all; you ended up tacitly accepting three-quarters of the lies he told in your quest to undo the other 25 per cent. And then the dust settled and everyone loved what he had to say, even though he hadn’t quite said it. "
6 " He was an ingeniously evolved parasite, the scion of a strain honed over generations to fool wider humanity into following his orders and tending to his needs. "
7 " You’re a parasite. You’re the worm in humanity’s apple. "
8 " All these things I remembered, and I remember thinking how it seemed like, no matter whether the groundswell of negative opinion was coming out of Australia or Germany, Beijing or Hyderabad, it always seemed to be the same class of people hiding behind it, reaping the benefits. "
9 " Or easier to give up yourself and be no more than a limb, an organ of the whole. But easy isn’t better. It’s like being more than a part of something that’s more than the sum of its parts. "
10 " Nobody believed anyone over Thompson, not in the end. Not even when they knew he was lying. Not even when the lies were tissue-thin. "
11 " Jagged ends of memories, like a jigsaw made of broken glass. Cut yourself to ribbons trying to piece it back together but then you're the glass as well as the hands so why not a little blood? "