Steve Perry Quotes

Who you are comes from who you were. You can’t escape your past; it follows you like a shadow.

Everybody’s got secrets, and some of the worst ones belong to those with the most power.

Never hide from the consequences of your orders.

Life is more important than glory.

The end did justify the means sometimes, otherwise nothing would ever be accomplished.

The mark of a civilized man was to know when to leave the party.

The end, in this case, would justify the means. It did that, sometimes. But somewhere along the way he had lost his godlike surety; he had had to think instead of feel, and the monkey brain was never as quiet as the zen mind.

Confounders aren't allowed in holding cells, Envoy—"
"And if snakes had legs, they'd be lizards," Massey said. "Let's not discuss things that don't apply to our situation, Lojtnant.

She didn’t have to play Pen’s game, she didn’t want to. The problem, as always with Pen, lay in figuring out what his game was.

I mean, look, I just broke into your private files. If I were you, I'd be more than a little upset."
Pen crinkled. "I'm not. It shows initiative.

He was a frustrated romantic, a thing often mistaken for skepticism.

A woman did what a woman had to, the best way she knew how. To do more was impossible, to do less, unthinkable.

Honor was in surviving, not fair play.

Of course, laws weren’t always just. Some rules outlawed a thing because it was intrinsically bad: child molestation, say. Other rules made harmless activities crimes only because someone wished them to be so. Take cohabitation on a religious holiday. On some worlds, it was legal on one day, illegal the next, and on the third, okay once again. Khadaji could see no moral dilemma there.

What other paths were there? His studies had shown him that revolution and evolution were the only ways that societies ever truly changed. Revolution and evolution, built of a mix of education and violence and politics and compromise and self-interest and self-preservation. Certainly, history showed that rigid societies, like ancient dinosaurs, always died. The Confed was the biggest dinosaur ever, and while it was already dying and had been doing so for a long time, it would take many years before it finally fell. Any empire which had to hold its citizens in check with military force was far down the road to destruction. Which brought up another thought: what would replace the dead beast when it began to rot? What parasite would emerge from the corpse to try and breed itself into superiority?