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1 " Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer. "
― H. Beam Piper ,
2 " He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he's going right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences and round-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance to foul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that's undemocratic. "
3 " Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for? "
4 " Zealous statesmen perhaps did more mischief than anything in the Galaxy--with the possible exception of procrastinating soldiers. That could indicate the fundamental difference between statecraft and war. "
5 " Everything has to be at once for six-month-old puppies, six-year-old children, and reformers of any age. "
6 " You have ability and people who don't never forgive you for it. Your very existence is a constant reproach to them. "
7 " these ideological cliques form in a government--or any other organization. Subordinates are always chosen for their agreement with the views of their superiors, and the extremists always get to the top and shove the moderates under or out. "
8 " It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running. "
9 " a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of. "
10 " Gresham's law, extended: Bad manners drive out good manners. "
11 " Everybody seems to have money, but the government is always broke. Deficit spending--and always the vital social services for which the government has to spend money. The most vital one, of course, is buying votes to keep the government in power. And it gets harder for the government to get anything done. "
12 " they have a democracy, and they are letting the enemies of democracy shelter themselves behind democratic safeguards. "
13 " is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian. "
14 " The whole society is a slave hierarchy. Everybody curries favor with the echelon above, and keeps his eye on the echelon below to make sure he isn't being undercut. We have something not too unlike that, ourselves. Any organizational society is, in some ways, like a slave society. "
15 " The unrealistic beliefs of diplomats are what soldiers die of, "
16 " Atrocity has a horrible facility for begetting atrocity. "
17 " Vengeance is a strange human motivation-- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature! "
18 " Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it's your master. "
19 " You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I'll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed. "
20 " People have to learn to live with newly-discovered facts; if they don't, they die of them. "