James S. A. Corey Quotes

“At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.”
“You like everyone,” Fayez teased. It’s your pathology.”
“You don’t like anyone.”
“That’s mine,” he said, grinning.

Thing about civilization, it’s what keeps people civil. You get rid of one, you can’t count on the other.

Naomi shook her head once, tightly, and held on to her anger like it was a vaccine against something worse.

You make it sound like there's a later in the game.
Miller's smile was enigmatic, and it looked a little like sorrow by the time it reached his eyes. "Until death all is life.

Sex was one of those things where the way it was supposed to work and the way it worked for him didn’t always match up real well. He knew all the stuff about love and affection, and that just seemed like making shit up. He understood making shit up. He also understood how people talked about it, and he could talk about it that way just to fit in.

Humans are structureless. They live in conflict with themselves and each other. Their great genius is rationalization: lying into mirrors until they bully and seduce themselves into things they would never otherwise do. They are creatures of self-delusion, regret, and desire.

I'm getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn't seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they'd never do if they were really thinking about it.

Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?

So why do you hate us? If you don't mind my asking.
You personally? I don't. But this conquistador bullshit? It's true I don't think much of it.
Singh leaned back in his chair, cocked his head. "This is all a conversation about politics for you, then? It matters to you that much whose vision guides the government, no matter what that vision is?
Not that academic," Holden said. "I've spent a lot of years trying to get people to get along without anyone's boot being on anyone's neck. Your plan A is what I've spent a lifetime pushing against.
Do you really think we're so bad? Look at what we've done, how we've done it. We haven't opened fire on a single ship that didn't attack us first. In all of history, when has a conqueror been able to say that? We have embraced local rule. Any of the colony worlds that submits can make their own local government, keep their own local customs—
Unless they conflict with your rules.
Of course.
Holden sipped his coffee. "That's the thing. The people you're controlling don't have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone's on the same page, things may be great, but when there's a question, you win. Right?
There has to be a way to come to a final decision.
No, there doesn't. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It's messy and undignified, but it's when we're at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there's just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.

That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency.

What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context.

Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.

No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.

The woman herself looked down at hem from where she was etched in stone. It was probably just his imagination, but she seemed amused. Like now that she was dead and not actually responsible for fixing any of the vast and secret shit show that was human history, she finally got the joke.

Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She’d seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She’d seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.