Wasp Quotes

What's the matter with you? Got a bellyache or something?
"No, sir. I've been thinking."
"Does it hurt that much?"

I was thinking," Harrison explained.
"I approve of that," put in His Excellency. He lugged a couple of huge tomes our of the wall-shelves, began to thumb rapidly through them. "Do plenty of thinking whenever you've the chance and it will become a habit. It will get easier and easier as time rolls on. In fact, a day may come when it can be done without pain.

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.

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

Appearances aren’t always what they seem.

Do you suppose that this other-life might be…might be…like us?"
"I see no reason why not," declared Bvandt, after some thought. "We are by far the highest form in the known cosmos, therefore any other high form must be similar."
"The logic of that is not evident.

Inside their military minds conditioning masqueraded as logic.

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.

Listen to me. You were born in Masham, capital city of Diracta – the Sirian home planet. Your father was a trader there at the time. You lived on Diracta until the age of seventeen, when you returned with your parents to Terra.

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.

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.

I thought—”
“Mr. McShane, I would advise to postpone thinking until you have accumulated sufficient facts to form a useful basis. That is the intelligent thing to do, is it not?

The role of peacemaker appeals to those with any claim to be civilized.

The stuff was about twelve gauge and near enough for his purpose. It resembled deep-colored copper but was not as soft as copper nor as heavy. Hard, springy and light, like telephone wire. If there were at least a thousand yards of it below, and if he could manage to drag it up to the ship, and if the golden thing didn’t come along and ball up the works, he might be able to blow free. Then he’d get to some place civilized—if he could find it. The future was based on an appalling selection of “ifs.”

By the standards of the dim past they were appallingly ugly; but by the standards of her especial planet and her especial era they were not ugly. They were merely an individualistic aspect of the same universal thing which is named Intelligence.