Top 15 Wasp Quotes

Science fiction, like any other genuine literary form, must evolve. It was easier in the old days — easier to find ideas, easier to stop in the middle of everything for a dissertation on Jupiter's moons. The modern way, starting a story in the middle of a future- or other-world environment and taking it from there is a challenge to the writer. It isn't always easy, but it is fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned in the cosmos it’s that of never despising an alien culture. A species too big to learn soon goes small.

After this, doors had to be opened with all the caution of a tax collector coping with a mysterious parcel that ticks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reasonableness is strength. Irrationality is weakness.

Obviously riled, he growled at Lawson, “The right to unobstructed passage covers our vessels as much as anyone else’s.”
“It covers no warship bearing instructions to intercept, question, search or detain any other spaceship it considers suspicious,” declared the other. “Violators of the law are not entitled to claim protection of the law.”
“Can you tell me how to conduct a war between systems without sending armed ships through space?” asked Markhamwit, bitterly sarcastic.
Lawson waved an indifferent hand. “We aren’t the least bit interested in that problem. It is your own worry.”
“It cannot be done,” Markhamwit shouted.
“That’s most unfortunate,” remarked Lawson, full of false sympathy. “It creates an awful state of no-war.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Is peace funny?”
“War is a serious matter,” bawled Markhamwit, striving to retain a grip on his temper. “It cannot be ended with a mere flick of the finger.”
“The fact should be borne in mind by those who so nonchalantly start them,” advised Lawson, quite unmoved by the Great Lord’s ire.
“The Nileans started it.”
“They say that you did.”
“They are incorrigible liars.”
“That’s their opinion of you, too.”
A menacing expression on his face, Markhamwit said, “Do you believe them?”
“We never believe opinions.”
“You are evading my question. Somebody has to be a liar. Who do you think it is?”
“We haven’t looked into the root-causes of your dispute. It is not our woe. So without any data to go upon we can only hazard a guess.”
“Go ahead and do some hazarding then,” Markhamwit invited. He licked expectant lips.
“Probably both sides have little regard for the truth,” opined Lawson, undeterred by the other’s attitude. “It is the usual setup. When war breaks out the unmitigated liar comes into his own. His heyday lasts for the duration. After that, the victorious liars hang the vanquished ones.”

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