S. M. Stirling Quotes

"Keep your own counsel—and use your head for something besides a battering ram, that is my advice to you. Keep up your chess; it stretches the mind and makes it supple.

He'd been fighting in the cause of civilization, and his stomach reminded him that he deserved some of its fruits.

Trust is the lubricant that enables men to work together, and they've thrown a handful of corundum grit into ours.

They rode armed for war, curved swords at their side and the thick horn-and-sinew bows of mounted archers in cases at their knees.

[...] Anyone who might think of attacking them would also probably recognize that they were armed. She smiled slightly; all three of them actually had valid concealed-carry permits for the Belgian FiveseveN specials under their jackets. Although not for the P90 machine pistols in the attaché cases, and some of the stuff in the vehicle would be right out of it. Semtex, timers, detonators, cans of gasoline and thermite bombs, for example. Even if the invoice reads "Cleaning supplies" back at HQ.

A libertarian is someone who can believe that the police are no more than a gang of thugs without realizing that in the absence of police, thugs will gather into gangs.

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

....another vision, where water still curled on the sandy beach beneath a clear blue sky where birds flew, but their patterns were mathematics precise beyond his comprehension. A man walked between buildings that were perfect, and empty. He turned to look at Rudi for an instant and where his eyes should have been were silvery tendrils that waved and sought.

The waxen line of the bowstrings struck their leather bracers with a light whapping sound ... A man dropped from each end of the attackers' rough formation, with the flat punching smack of arrowheads striking flesh loud enough to hear.

When men hunted each other to eat, there could be no trust, and trust was what let even the wildest men work together.

[H]alf-animal they might be, but the savages were survivors of generation upon generation of survivors in a game where losers went into the stewpot.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

And Sita, isn't it about time you grew up?"
"You mean it's adult behavior to let ambassadors get ripped up by boars on the family's hunting grounds, brother?

The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that pricked at his eyes. Without that tapestry of colour and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning.

One of the pieces of advice his father had given him when he got his commission was that excitable women were wearing, but often worth the trouble.