Joe Haldeman Quotes

I never found anyone else and I don’t want anyone else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.

Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn’t true.

CAROL: You don’t care for the music?
JACQUE: Music! It’s just a gimmick to sell lutes and flutes.

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

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

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

Human nature does change, and the fact that we’ve developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise there would be no universe. Unless we’re the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there’s no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we’re the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Somebody does have to be first.
But maybe the first is always the last.

If you asked him, he would say the only connection between free will and religion in his life was the fact that he hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since he turned eighteen.

The more leaves, the more Tree.

It was full of jargon, charts and the kind of vague mathematics that social scientists admire.

One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.

“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.”

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.

“You were a Jesuit?”
“Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass.”

It was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.