Top 15 Tom Holt Quotes

Why get so worked up about a nonexistent threat? Answer: someone somewhere is covering something up.

Take anything to its logical conclusion and you’re likely to end up with the grotesque and the absurd.

Evolution takes no prisoners. A loathsome philosophy, but hard to argue against. Repulsive, but entirely valid. Otherwise, the Earth would still be populated by giant pea-brained lizards.

You’re not supposed to be always on the doorstep clamouring for instructions. Use your discretion and your initiative, they say, that’s why you’re the grade you are. And then, when it all goes wrong, it’s all your fault. What on Earth possessed you to do all that without checking back first? How could you have been so stupid?

On the way out, I reflected on the way in which so many mortals pray. It’s strictly a rational proposition. If He exists, they argue, it’s best to be on the right side of Him; if He doesn’t, well, no harm done, it hasn’t cost anything. I’m not like that, unfortunately. Either I believe or I don’t. And I believed—thought I believed—in the doctrines of Saloninus concerning the invalidity of conventional morality. I believed that there are no absolutes of good and evil and that all that matters, in the final analysis, is which side you’re on. It was, I felt, a doctrine which accorded exactly with my own observations and experience.
The problems start when your side isn’t on your side anymore.

The great thing about not necessarily believing in your beliefs is that it’s so much easier to revise them.

The fact is, the more you look for something, the likelier you are to find it, even if isn’t actually there; sooner or later, if you look hard enough, you’ll find something. The trick is then to interpret what you’ve found as what you were looking for.

I started from the premise, which sort of came with the brief, that priests and religion are full of shit; from there it followed naturally that the morality they espouse must be false or faulty. Having established the side I was on, I looked around for arguments to support it. I found they came quite easily to me. I started with various inconsistencies in religious doctrine, and found that they derived from compromises made by long-ago ecumenical councils to reconcile violent political disputes within the clerical hierarchy. I argued, if the priests make up bits of doctrine to suit themselves, maybe they made up the whole thing. From there it was no big deal to demonstrate that they’d done exactly that. The Book as we know it proved to be not a monolithic and unambiguous record of the word of the Invincible Sun, but rather a negotiated construct, patched together from four or five sources, revised and edited and redacted by generations of scholars, some of whom belonged to such and such a sect or interest group, others of whom supported diametrically opposite positions or interests. It was no bother at all to show that the Book was a political object with no real credibility. And once you’ve knocked out the Book, you’ve dealt religion a blow from which it can never recover.

He had the answer to the secret of the universe in his hands, but he was more interested in saving his own neck and making money. Extraordinary man.

You twist everything," he said.
"Guilty," I said. "Though I prefer to think of it as a form of art.

But the unforeseen consequences—"
"What consequences?"
"I don't know, I can't foresee them.

Our lot may be all-seeing and all-knowing, but that’s a long way removed from all-understanding.

The more he asserted it, the less they believed him, which is human nature for you.

I was deeply troubled. Not in itself unusual; but I had a distinct feeling that I’d missed something. That’s not a normal or comfortable feeling for me. I don’t miss things. Like I said, I live and have my being in the detail. Also, if I had that feeling, it was because I was meant to. It was as though he’d put up a big painted sign saying UP TO SOMETHING and was sitting directly beneath it.

It’s a basic tenet of military science. No stronghold can be taken if a mule laden with gold bars can leave it unobserved.