Wasp Quotes

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

Inside their military minds conditioning masqueraded as logic.

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

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

It's your right to refuse to believe. That's freedom, isn't it?
"Up to a point. A man has duties. He's no right to refuse those."
"No?" She raised tantalizing eyebrows, delicately curved. "Who defines those duties—himself, or somebody else?"
"His superiors, most times."
"No man is superior to another. No man has the right to define another man's duties." She paused, eyeing him speculatively. "If anyone on Terra exercises such idiotic power, it is only because idiots permit him. They fear freedom. They prefer to be told. They like being ordered around. What men!"

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.

Back at Terran H.Q.," said Maxwell, "one is not shot at dawn for sabotage, treachery, assassination or any equally trifling misdeed. One is blindfolded and stood against the wall for not filling out forms, or for filling out the wrong ones, or for filling out the right ones with the wrong details.

Nobody knew better than the Solarians that wars are not caused , declared or willingly fought by nations, planetary peoples or shape-groups, for these consist in the main of plain, ordinary folk who crave nothing more than to be left alone. The real culprits are power-drunken cliques of near-maniacs who by dint of one means or another have coerced the rest.

She was of her own kind and it was a life form old in experience and remarkably astute. It had faced the inevitable a thousand times before and had learned the futility of battering against it head-on. It knew what to do with an immovable object: one climbs over it or burrows under it or sneaks around it. Once uses one’s brains because they are there to be used.
Inevitability was not to be feared.
That which cannot be stayed must be avoided with skill and ingenuity.

I give up. I cannot argue with someone who casts aside the accepted rules of logic and invents ones of his own.

That was the kind of chance that must be taken when one holes up in known and regularly checked haunts. The risk was not enormous, in fact it was small – but it was still there. And when tried, sentenced and waiting for death it is no consolation to know that what came off was a hundred to one chance. To keep going and to maintain the one-man battle the enemy had to be outwitted, if possible, all along the line and all the time.

No mob is composed of men, as such. It is made up of a few ringleaders and a horde of stupid followers." He patted his guns. "You can always tell a ringleader—invariably he is the first to open his mouth!

Reasonableness is strength. Irrationality is weakness.

What do you say to that?"
Giving a deep shrug, Taylor said, "That kind of political cynicism has been long out of date where I come from. I can't help it if mentally you're about ten millennia behind us.

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