David Weber Quotes

David Weber delivers blunt, darkly funny musings about duty and fate.

42 quotes

My duty is not affected by what others may or may not do to discharge their own.

#1
But what kept them on their feet when there was no sane reason for hope were the bonds between them, loyalty to one another, the knowledge others depended on them even as they depended on those others. And sometimes, all too rarely, it came down to a single person it was simply unthinkable to fail. Someone they knew would never quit on them, never leave them in the lurch.

#2
The world's best swordsman doesn't fear the second best; he fears the worst swordsman, because he can't predict what the idiot will do.

#3
But the universe wasn't really unfair, she thought, and her mouth quirked. It just didn't give much of a damn one way or the other.

#4
I suppose I ought to think up some dramatic, quotable phrase for Public Information and the history books, but I'm damned if any of them come to mind. Besides, admitting the truth wouldn't sound too good (...) The truth, Russell, is that now the moment's here, I'm scared shitless. Somehow I don't think even Public Information could turn that into good copy.

#5
: Henke sensed her terrifying aptitude for destruction as never before. Henke had feared for her sanity; now she knew the truth was almost worse than that. Honor wasn't insane - she simply didn't care. She'd lost not only her sense of balance but any desire to regain it.

#6
He bit his lip and realized how right the Protector had been to stop him from offering her a commission months ago. Not because she couldn't do the job, but because she was afraid she couldn't. Because she would have refused it, and that refusal would have ended her career forever. Inability, real or imagined, could never truly be overcome once an officer accepted deep inside that he could no longer hack it. That damage was almost always permanent, for it was self-inflicted and no one else could heal it for him.

#7
Perhaps his love for her made him less than impartial, but he also knew how deeply she'd been hurt and chided her for judging herself so much more harshly than she would have judged someone else:

#8
No one else knew how she'd longed for extinction, how much part of her had hungered simply to quit. To end. She'd once intended, coldly and logically, to do just that: She'd sacrificed her naval career: and a corner of her mind suspected she'd actually wanted to sacrifice it - that she'd planned to use the loss of the vocation she loved so much as one more reason to end her dreary existence. It had seemed only reasonable then; now the memory was one more coal of contempt for her own weakness, her willingness to surrender to her own pain when she'd always refused to surrender to anyone else.

#9
'Oh, Christ! We're all gonna die. You seen the kinds'a casualty lists she comes up with?'

#10
The reason for his anguish, the intolerable burden which had broken him at last, was the simplest thing in the world: he loved his wife. He always had, and he always would. Nothing could change that, but that was what had made his agony bite so deep, the reason he couldn't forgive himself for not somehow making things 'all right' again: and the reason he'd had to turn to someone else to rebuild himself when the collapse came. It had been cowardly of him, in many ways, but he simply could not have made himself dump his weakness, his collapse on her shoulders while she coped with everything God had already done to her.

#11
God, I love the 'fine morality' of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.

#12
Son, you'll know you're in love when a woman's voice settles into your spine.

#13
'No problem, kaja' Lara nodded with exaggerated obeisance. 'You may lead, so long as we may follow.'

#14
Giving orders you know won't be obeyed is one of the best ways I know to destroy your own authority.
Oh, bother!,” said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
Your Grace," she said, "I have only one question. Do you wish this man crippled, or dead?
It was rumored she held grudges till they died of old age, then had them stuffed and mounted.
I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember. Apollo 11 didn't give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.
Vegtables, what food eats before it becomes food.
Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn't prove.
All men begin as good men. What they are taught as children, what is expected of them as young men, is either the armor about that goodness or the flaw that allows evil in.
She didn't know a lot about politics – yet – but she'd learned enough in her history classes to know politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.
I think it's like that for people who don't remember 1969 first-hand. It's that sense of 'old hat.' Of 'been there, done that.' Space shuttles, space stations, communications satellites, GPS - they're all part of our everyday, taken-for-granted world in 2009, not part of an incredible odyssey.
It hadn't really percolated through my brain that I was going to see real, live TV from the surface of the Moon, and boy, oh, boy, had that Saturn V launch been exciting! And then, there it was - late at night, sitting up, watching, and there was Neil Armstrong actually standing on the surface of the Moon.
“Admiralty House was a modest structure, only a little over a hundred stories in height,”
“Apparently, for some reason known only to themselves, these people... have chosen to cling to hydrocarbon-fueled power generation well past the point at which they could have replaced it with nuclear generation.”
“The bigger the lie, apparently, the more likely the uninformed were to accept it,”
“recipient and that, as a surprise honeymoon gift, I'd”
“that power setting produced an acceleration of over”
“Shergahn and friend lay like poleaxed steers, and the Daranfelian's greasy hair was thick with potatoes, carrots, gravy, and chunks of beef. His companion had less stew in his hair, but an equally large lump was rising fast, and Brandark flipped his improvised club into the air, caught it in proper dipping position, and filled it once more from the pot without even glancing at them. He raised the ladle to his nose, inhaled deeply, and glanced at the cook with an impudent twitch of his ears. "Smells delicious," he said while the laughter started up all around the fire. "I imagine a bellyful of this should help a hungry man sleep. Why, just look what a single ladle of it did for Shergahn!”
“This just gets worse and worse," Rob Pierre sighed as he skimmed Leonard Boardman's synopsis of his latest gleanings from the Solarian League reporters covering the PRH. "How can one person—one person, Oscar!—do this much damage? She's like some damned elemental force of nature!" "Harrington?" Oscar Saint-Just quirked an eyebrow and snorted harshly at Pierre's nodded confirmation. "She's just happened to be in the right places—or the wrong ones, I suppose, from our perspective—for the last, oh, ten years or so. That's the official consensus from my analysts, at least. The other theory, which seems to have been gaining a broader following of late, is that she's in league with the Devil.”
“It had to be the greatest irony in the history of mankind, he thought. The last Christian in the entire universe was a machine.”
“She was never certain how long she wept, and it didn't really matter. It wasn't something to be measured by clocks, cut up into minutes and seconds.”
“Falderson," he said quietly to Bahzell in passable Navahkan, "is as stupid as the day is long." He craned his neck to gaze up at the hradani and shook his head. "In fact, he's even stupider than I thought. You, sir, are the biggest damned hradani-no offense-I think I've ever seen.”
“She really should be careful about imputing sordid motives to the First Lord. Not because she doubted that he had them, but because not even Sir Edward Janacek could have only sordid motivations. That would have completely devalued his ability to do such things out of simple stupidity, instead of calculation.”
“were significantly more”
“It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you think you know that isn’t so.”
“...there was an almost terrifying lack of intelligence in his eyes.”
“They didn't agree on everything. They didn't share all the same opinions. In fact, there was enormous scope for disagreement, argument, even quarrels. But where it mattered - where the wellsprings of their personalities rose and gave meaning to their lives - they were the same.”
“There are two sides to every dialogue, but if you accept the other side's terms without demanding equal time for your own, then they control the debate and its outcome.”
“if I've learned one thing over the years, it's that when it comes down to raw emotion against reason, emotion wins.”