Joe Haldeman Quotes

Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.

Any time somebody starts out a sentence with your name, Leonard thought, they’re trying to sell you something.

“We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”

It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn’t involuntary.

“We’re in jail, Charlie.” I made a gesture that didn’t knock anything over. “We can’t see the bars because they’re over the horizon.”

Rationalism doesn’t require “belief,” only observation. The real, measurable world doesn’t care what you believe.

“You’re actually a soldier,” he said to me, “and you go along with this foolishness?”
“I didn’t ask to be a soldier. And I can’t imagine a peace as foolish as this war we’re in.”

She hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Fathers and daughters don’t communicate that well even when alien languages and secret conspiracies aren’t involved.

“Everybody rich and happy.” She smiled. “Also complacent and rather stupid, you may have noticed.”

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

Most aliens in science fiction aren’t truly alien, and that’s not because science fiction writers lack imagination, but because the purpose of an alien in a story is usually to provide a meaningful distortion of human nature.

Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems.

She smiled. “I wouldn’t mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?”
“I think it’s a difference between you and merely sane people.”

My own religion, if you can call it that, had changed in its fundamental premise, but not its basic assertion: I’d always told religious friends that there may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn’t want to have him over for dinner. I’ll stand by that last part.