James S. A. Corey Quotes

Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good.

Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.

What scares me, Mose. It isn't fucking it up and dying. What if we fuck up, but we don't die. What if we fuck it all up and live? We're at the end of something, sure. Maybe we're at the beginning of something too. Maybe we make a whole new world. A whole new planet like Earth used to be. Hundreds of generations. Billions of people, that all start here. And we fuck it up for them.
I don't understand.
What if we just go on like people always have? The same bullshit. Give the same bullies and liars power like we did before. Cut all the same corners. Put up with all the same hypocrites. Make everything here into more of the shit that got us here. That seems worse. For me? That's worse.

We're the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We're the good guys here.
And the moral high ground is a lovely place," Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. "It won't stop a missile, though.

He didn’t remember who’d said it, but when he’d been much younger, someone had told him that saving money for an economic collapse was a bad plan. Who knew what scrip would matter and what would just be a number in an account no one cared about? The things that would last were bullets and liquor, not cash. When the apocalypse came, bullets and liquor would be the only currency that mattered.

The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

It's good being young," he said, "but some people wear it better than others.

Nature was beautiful, wherever she found it. And it was cruel. She didn’t know why she kept expecting humanity to be different. Why she pretended the same rules that applied to mountain lions and parasitic wasps didn’t also constrain her. Red in tooth and claw, and at every level. In the Bible, even angels murdered humanity’s babies when God asked them to.

And because it was the most habitable of the new planets by orders of magnitude, it was developed. Because it was developed, it was influential. Because it was influential, it was wealthy. And because it was wealthy, it was corrupt.

“Optimism is for assholes,” Miller said with a laugh.

Humanity was so flawed. Not just her, but everyone. Half the population was below average intelligence. Half below average dedication. Average adherence to duty. The cruel law of statistics. It was astounding that as a race they’d managed as much as they had.

That's the problem with things you can't do twice," Naomi said. "You can't ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.
No. But you can say that if we don't do something different, it'll happen again. And again. And again, over and over until something changes the game.

The universe is always stranger than you think.
It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.

Panicking people for no reason—
Panicking at this point isn't unreasonable," Monica said. "And deciding for people what they should get to know so they do what you think they should do? That isn't how the good guys act, and you know it. It's paternalistic, it's condescending, and it's beneath you. Maybe not them, The political movers and shakers. But it's beneath you.

She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.