Top 15 Nancy Kress Quotes

It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.

History isn’t morality.

Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive.

By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair.
But he’d always known that was true of the universe.

Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job.

She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness.

Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil.

Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money.

In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing.

That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing.

Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?

He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.”
“I don’t believe in psychology,” Capelo said flatly.
Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?”
“If it’s based on chemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about the mind are not.”
“Ah,” Marbet said.
“Fairy tales, all. From Uncle Droselmeyer Freud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”

An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives.

But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science.