Michael F. Flynn Quotes

Much as I would tend my manor in peace, peace needs the consent of all, while one alone may raise a war. I swore an oath to protect the defenseless and punish peace-breakers, and that includes peace-breaking Herrenfolk. Your priests say to forgive your enemy, and that is well, or revenge follows revenge until eternity. But between a man who will stop at nothing and one who will hesitate at anything, the advantage is generally to the former. The pagans had right, too. It is a false peace to be overforgiving. Your enemy may read forbearance as weakness and so be drawn to strike.

Cigars were for talk; pipes for reflection.

The nag is as fat as a monk—and will stop to eat at every chance, so the resemblance is no happenstance.

Sometimes the obvious is only wishful thinking.

Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of the insensible to a fear of the sensible."
"Thought-lacking!"
"So it is; but it is what folk do.

If people don’t leave a hole in your life when they are gone, Consuela, they were never in your life at all.

He could not live again in Paris. It had seemed better then only because he had been younger, and had not yet known contentment.

Philosophers will always have logical reasons for avoiding the good—and those reasons will always hang on their lust for material goods. A man who has little thinks little of sharing it; but the man who has much will clutch it with his dying fingers.

What the prisoner said made some sense. He could see how technological progress—and social change with it—was coupled with free trade and the free exchange of ideas. Yet, he wasn’t at all sure that it was necessarily a good thing. There was a lot to be said for stability and continuity.

You have a grim taste in miracles, my friend.

Had you learned to flatter the Kaiser, you would need not live in the back woods."
"Had you learned to live in the back woods, you would need not flatter the Kaiser.

One does not debate nature; one experiences nature.

Brilliance cannot improvise on faulty data.

No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another’s.

The philosophy of the likelihood of events concludes that folk from different worlds must have different forms.