Wasp Quotes

We first dug out sixteen thousand fluent speakers of the several Sirian dialects. Eliminating the females and children brought the number down to nine thousand. Then, step by step, we cut out the elderly, the infirm, the weak, the untrustworthy, the temperamentally unsuitable. We weeded out those too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too stupid, too rash, too cautious, and so forth. We weren't left with many among whom to seek for wasps.

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.

Time—the older you get the faster it goes.

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.

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.”

When one is fighting a paper-war one uses paper-war tactics that in the long run can be just as lethal as high explosive. And the tactics are not limited in scope by use of one material. The said material is very variable in form. Paper can convey a private warning, a public threat, secret temptation, open defiance; wall-bills, window-stickers, leaflets dropped by the thousands from the roof-tops, cards left on seats or slipped into pockets and purses... money.

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

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.

One cannot analogize the non-existent.

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

Power and scapegoats go together like husband and wife.

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.

The first rule of captaincy is to consider the men before considering an exterior problem. There is no real solution to any predicament unless there is also the means to apply it.

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.