Wasp Quotes

Anyway, one soon loses appreciation of the value of something gained for nothing, one becomes bored by getting it for the mere asking."
"I don't," assured Zalumar. "I like it, I love it."
"Every day I see windows full of gold watches," said Lakin. "They tire me. I have a gold watch which I obtained by demanding it. I don't want fifty gold watches. I don't even want two of them. So what use are all the others to me?

As for the causes, he listened to them with boredom. Only the strong know there is but one cause of war. All the other multitudinous reasons recorded in the history books were not real reasons at all. They were nothing but plausible pretexts. There was but one root-cause that persisted right back to the dim days of the jungle. When two monkeys want the same banana, that is war.

Put out the light and there is stumbling in the dark.

Given brawn and brains and enough time there’s always a way in or out. Escapees shot down as they bolted had chosen the wrong time and wrong place, or the right time and wrong place, or the right place at the wrong time. Or they’d neglected brawn in favor of brains, a common fault of the impatient. Or they’d neglected brains in favor of brawn, a fault of the reckless.

Markham was going to hand him a tough one. That was Markham’s job: to rake through a mess of laconic, garbled, distorted or eccentric reports, pick out the obvious problems and dump them squarely in the laps of whoever happened to be hanging around and was considered suitable to solve them. One thing could be said in favor of this technique: its victims often were bothered, bedeviled or busted, but at least they were never bored. The problems were not commonplace, the solutions sometimes fantastic.

Reasonableness is strength. Irrationality is weakness.

On my world we’re old, incredibly old, and we’ve learned a lot from a past which is long and lurid. We’ve had empires by the dozens, though none as great as yours. They all went the same way—down the sinkhole. They all vanished for the same fundamental and inevitable reasons. Empires come and empires go, but little men go on forever.

Superior life does not establish itself by benefit of brains alone; manual dexterity is equally essential.

Well, that is a valuable addition to the sum total of our knowledge. Our minds are now enriched by the thought that an anonymous individual may be presented with a futile object for an indefinable purpose when he reaches his unknown destination.

He thinks he’s heap big. To me he’s just a big heap.

The curse of being an officer is that one is outranked by other officers.

Things done the hard way aren’t necessarily done better. Nor are they done badly because done the easy way. The essence of progress consists of finding ways of avoiding old-time difficulties.

The World Council," Railton snorted. "All they're interested in is exploration, discovery and trade. All they can think of is culture and cash. They're completely devoid of any sense of peril."
"Not being military officers," Ashmore pointed out, "they can hardly be expected to exist in a state of perpetual apprehension.

The stupid believe because they are credulous. The intelligent do not blindly accept but, when aware of their own ignorance, neither do they reject.

From what I have heard, from all that I have been told, I deduce a basic rule applying to lifeforms deemed intelligent."…
"And what is this rule?"
"That the governing body of any lifeforms such as ours will be composed of power-lovers rather than of specialists."
"Well, isn't it?"
"Unfortunately, it is. Government falls into the hands of those who desire authority and escapes those with other interests." He paused, went on. "That is not to say that those who govern us are stupid. They are quite clever in their own particular field of mass-organization. But by the same token they are pathetically ignorant of other fields.