L.E. Modesitt Jr. Quotes

You are always prompt, Minister Eschbach. You do not make time a game of position." "Oh, but I do. My time is important. So is yours. When I waste neither, you find yourself indebted to me.

He learned that some things that seemed to make little sense were senseless only from his point of view, not necessarily from someone else's perspective.

Don't you understand?" asked Cerrelle, her voice that of a teacher to a very young student. "No child asks to be born. No member of any society is given that choice. The only choice you have - the only real choice any of us has - is whether you will be a productive member of society. Society doesn't owe you anything.

Never mistake law for justice. Justice is an ideal, and law is a tool.

An accurate fact in an incorrect context is an effective lie. As

We all feel better when we can defend ourselves. When we can tell ourselves and everyone else that we did what was necessary and no more. That's easy. What's so much harder is doing what is necessary before others see it and when the actions are harsh and unpopular.

I took the stairs two at a time. There's a time for decorum and a time to run like a crazed vorpal's after you, except a crazed vorpal's an oxymoron. This was the time to run.

The difference between an explanation and an excuse lies with the one receiving it.

Tried hard, he did, but trying's not doing.

Was attraction and repulsion all a matter of appearances? Or preconceptions?

Was there really something to the obsolete idea of a national character? Some countries just changed tyrants, without changing anything else.

I only did about one novel a year while I was working full time, but since 1993, I've averaged two and a half books a year.

Someone in my country made a comment along the lines that solutions are always possible if you are willing to let someone else take the credit.

Life wasn't yes-no, on-off. Life was shades of gray, and rainbows not in the order of the spectrum. Our bodies have always known more than our minds have acknowledged they knew.

we don't legislate stupidity, you protect it and it breeds (paraphased from memory) (Adiamante)

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

That's the problem with all of us. We've never time to think about the past, and we're always planning for the future. And since the future's always the future, we never live in the present.

We all might be in less trouble if we did not speak, I sometimes think.

The politicians pose some danger because they are interesting and employ popular vanity and the illusion of ideals to make small changes in society. Small does not necessarily mean insignificant, and for this reason the politicians must be watched.

Can violence and the use of force to effect change upon the universe be left to the young? Do they see what was, what is, and what might yet be? Have they suffered, watched evil fall upon the good, or good upon the evil?
Or should the burden of violence be left to those who can bear it most lightly - upon those who have closed their minds or their feelings? How can they understand the suffering that they must inflict?
Should the burden of force be laid upon the short-lived, who will not see the consequences of their actions? How can they dispense force with compassion if they can escape the knowledge of what they do?...
The greater the force brought to bear, the older and wiser must be the entity who wields it. Wisdom allows sorrow. Age allows experience, and knowledge reinforces wisdom and experience....
Those who would bear the burden of force must be those who are strong and do not seek it, for those who seek force would misuse it, and those who are weak would shy from what they must do....
Findings of the Colloquy
[Translated from the Farhkan]
1227-E.N.P.

Every piece of the globe has been conquered at least a handful of times." "And the conquerors promptly forgot that they stole it from someone else so that they could claim some sort of moral right to the land when someone else tried to take it away from them," I suggested.

The unexpected only means that which you have not expected.

Words evolve, perhaps more rapidly and tellingly than do their users, and the change in meanings reflects a society often more accurately than do the works of many historians. In he years preceding the first collapse of NorAm, the change in the meaning of one word predicted the failure of that society more immediately and accurately than did all the analysts, social scientists, and historians. That critical word? 'Discrimination.' We know it now as a term meaning 'unfounded bias against a person, group, or culture on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic background.' Prejudice, if you will.

The previous meaning of this word was: 'to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, to differentiate, to recognize as different.' Moreover, the connotations once associated with discrimination were favorable. A person of discrimination was one of taste and good judgment. With the change of the meaning into a negative term of bias, the English language was left without a single-word term for the act of choosing between alternatives wisely, and more importantly, left with a subterranean negative connotation for those who attempted to make such choices.

In hindsight, the change in meaning clearly reflected and foreshadowed the disaster to come. Individuals and institutions abhorred making real choices. At one point more than three-quarters of the youthful population entered institutions of higher learning. Credentials, often paper ones, replaced meaning judgment

Popularity is an element in any system, even the most autocratic and regimented, because it is so much easier to count heads or hands than to evaluate excellence.

I will die, later or sooner, and what I understand will be lost, for when men and women seek truth, what they find is as deceptive as lies, and neither truth nor lies exist outside of a deceptive soul.

Minds, like parachutes, function better when open, but, like fists, they strike harder when closed.

Sometimes, Johan ... " He offered a self-deprecating grin. "It would be easier to forget the past." I understood, although I didn't know that he knew that. "Sometimes ... but without the past we wouldn't be who we are.

A chronometer will measure intervals precisely, but not the passage of time.

Then, as he chevies the ancient ones on their way, he opens a tunnel, a tunnel in time, back to when a certain FO star was younger, and without a planet.

The ancients sought their gods in temples, in worldly goods, in the technology they created, and lastly in the stars. They found neither gods nor enlightenment in the materials of the universe, nor will any wise soul find aught in such but the reflection of sorrow.

The Russians have a saying. Offer a man a finger, and he will take your hand - if not your arm.

...there being a god, that god must be worshiped. Worship means raising the god above the individual, and liturgies often make the point that the individual is less than nothing compared to the deity. If this be done, then, when the god is invoked, the individual has so little worth that he or she may be sacrificed for the needs of the god....
And who speaks for the god? If all people do, then no one does, and there is no god. If the people accept a priesthood, or the equivalent, then those priests exercise whatever power that god's believers grant that god over them, and that elite may cause an individual to be worth less, to be exiled, or even to die or to be killed. Yet such powers do not come from a deity.
In modern history and science, never has there been a verified occasion of a god appearing or demonstrating the powers ascribed throughout history to deities. Always, there is a prophet who speaks for the god. Why cannot the god speak? If a god is omnipotent, then the god can speak. If he cannot, then that god is not omnipotent. Often the prophets say that a god will only speak to the chosen, the worthy.
Should a people accept a god who is either too powerless to speak, or too devious and skeptical to appear? Or a god who will only accept those who swallow a faith laid out by a prophet who merely claims that deity exists - without proof? Yet people have done so, and have granted enormous powers to those who speak for god.

All life is sorrow.

Except for the occasional great person or hero, or tragedy, death has always been personal, affecting one individual and the handful of people who cared about that dead individual. The rest of society went on, and that had been true as far back as the ancient pyramids and great walls, and remained true, and would doubtless remain so into the far future.

You cannot have a strong society if you pander to the unintelligent, the willing weak, and the unfortunates. The universe does not reward compassion, only survival and success.

In a technological society, the practice of completely private property cannot exist.

I've often said that there's no one thing that I do or have done that is particularly unique. There have been a lot of other authors who were in the military. There have been a few others who were pilots. There have certainly been a lot of other people who were in politics or served congressional staffs.

The great fault of logic is that it seems so reasonable, even when it is not.

Energy is matter, and vice versa, and if you can control energy through your mind, theoretically the rest follows.

I'd have felt better with Morgen to talk to, to help, but all I had was memory and a soulsong to help me with our ancient cousins from across the stars, cousins so willful they could not see. Cousins even more willful than the ancient heroes my mother had bequeathed to me.

Amazing how what you didn't have kept coming to mind.

The empty quarter, the empty half, the empty outside of a full beaker ... why are these the things he looks for?

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

Professional interrogators should study mothers.

If the body is unmastered, the mind will remain unmastered.

Symbolic forms have always been the supports of civilizations, their laws, and their morality. Since symbolic forms are illusions, and illusions sustain civilization, those who rule must maintain illusion.

The locales varied, but the approach was the same - set up the ground rules so that the opposition's only real options appeared unreasonable, illegal, or futile. For years, if not generations, it had worked well. But there were signs that the tactic was getting old, and creating more and more frustration - leading to a social explosion?

Do you really know what they want?" "I don't have an absolute confirmation, but almost anything would be better than what I've prepared for." I laughed hoarsely. "Then, I'll probably find out that what they want is even worse than that. It usually works that way.

Hatred is a form of faith, distilled by passion to remove all rationality.

Death had two meanings - the loss of resources to society and the personal grief of the few who cared. Fersonne's value was less than that of one cargo, and this time, I was one of the few who cared, and I wanted there to be some meaning

Most people did think that way, unable to look beyond the letter of the rules or what they believed.

how could so many people talk about the good of Query, and the good of the Guard, and then act in ways basically immoral or destructive just to be a little higher, just to get a star with silver edges instead of gold edges?

As usual, they'd missed the point, almost as if on purpose.

Once more the evil Daryn Alwyn strikes." "That really bothers you, doesn't it?" "These people are trying to install a tyranny - an even greater tyranny. They've used the current system to strangle any opposition. They're responsible for the deaths of half my family, and no one can or will do anything, and I'm a villain for trying to expose them." I laughed, bitterly.

If you do good because you expect to be rewarded, it is greed.

There are two sides to reality. There is what is, and there is what people believe. Seldom

Baldur laughed. "I don't think you understand just how alien these people are." "They aren't people, Sammis said." "In my view, anything that thinks is a person." I had to think about that. Didn't flying gophers think a little? Where did you draw the line?

Each hero had a tale, of the old days, and of how he had routed and killed, and set things to right, sometimes to right the right that the hero before him had righted.

Time to face the well-groomed and empty-minded masses." "All young in any culture tend to be empty-minded," I pointed out. "I suspect" we were. "We were probably happier then.

When the symbolic images developed by the society no longer work, and the images which do work are not those of the society, the individual has nowhere to turn.

Didn't need to fear the Lord on Josephat either, just the idiots who thought they knew His will.

Think about the adiamante." I was too tired to say much more. "It says more than I can." And it did - the hardest manmade substance, and it couldn't stand up to the souls of human beings.

Love of another is merely empty flattery and self-deception for one who cannot accept himself without pretense.

A culture that blames the rest of the world or the rest of the galaxy for its ills is likely to stoop to anything. One

You didn't ask us about whether it was safe to take your troops out of the locial. You told us that was what you were doing. Your assumption was that Old Earth is perfectly safe unless you're warned. Is deep space safe? Would you drop into the sun's photosphere because no one warned you it would incinerate you? Nothing is perfectly safe. We don't provide warning signs to protect you from yourselves. Try to remember that.

We developed a philosophical credo and applied it consistently. We accept that morality, power, and consensus are the underpinnings for any society and work to maintain all three in balance. Trust and mutual respect are, in a way, the mortar that hold the other three together.

Power cannot be maintained and effectively exercised without a moral structure accepted and practiced by all because power attracts the corruptible and because corruption destroys consensus.

Intelligence is overrated by any species that has it, and that's provable by the fact that all intelligent species are outlived by a factor of a hundred to one, if not a thousand to one, by nonintelligent species, who don't have the brains or perversity to destroy themselves or their environments.

The greatest of all faults in a politician, and in any leader, is the failure to recognize that charisma has nothing to do with ability, excellence, or goodness. In fact, charisma enables far more the evils of the universe than great and worthy accomplishments, Give me pedestrian accomplishments over charisma any day.

They say you can do anything with plastique except play with sparks, but I still treat things that can blow you apart with respect. It can't hurt.

Albertini stared at a dented samovar. "Ser, what do you have against the samovar?" "Nothing." Trystin grinned. "I like tea. But the revs don't, I guess." "They're crazy, all of them.

No society that places the individual above itself will survive; but neither will any society that places the individual below itself.

Life offers no theology. There is but music and dance.

Power beyond great power allows honesty and compels those in such a society to demand it.

All life is structure.

The difference between truth and honesty is the difference between the riverbed and the river.

I kept watching the trees, as if I could see them grow or something. They didn't. The only thing that grew was their shadows.

The headline is good - 'World-Renowned Pair Open Concert Reason.

Deities are invented by fallible and finite beings in the hope and desire to create immortal perfection; unfortunately, such deities only reflect their creators and inspire their followers to similar imperfections.

Behind your reaction is a feeling that whatever is 'true' must be able to be expressed logically. Men, in particular, have a tendency to confuse correct logic with an accurate assessment of a situation. Be careful of any situation that you have to reason through logically, because if you have to work to reason it out, you're probably missing something.

Political science came into being as alchemy was being discredited, although history has since proved that alchemy had a better record.

If I recall correctly, I think I signed my first contract with Tor in 1983.

A name is only what others want you to believe." He pauses, hoping that the pause will let the meaning sink in. "I am what I am, not what others would have you believe." Martel smiles. "And a pleasant evening to you all.

Politicians who don't have to face the weaponry they have built have always worried me." "Politicians don't have to worry about facing weaponry of any sort. That's the definition of a politician - someone who gets someone else to pay the bill and take the bullets.

Martel also knows Kryn will not accept him, readies himself, drawing his cloak of darkness from the closet of time around the corner from now, preparing to use it at the proper instant.

While every new fantasy author is hailed as unique, new, and different, Brandon Sanderson's ELANTRIS does indeed provide an absorbing adventure in a unique, different, and well-thought-out fantasy world, with a few nifty twists as well.

The problem with having currency is that any society that controls it eventually debases it and taxes it. Any society that doesn't control it will still have it evolve, and then the currency becomes pegged to outside influences - like the scarcity of precious metals, colored seashells, or large circular rocks with holes in the middle.

The end is always the same. That's why what we do does matter. Good or bad, we die. If we bring some light and prosperity into the world, isn't that better than there being less light?

The tongue of the adder, visible only briefly, is a small matter.

she stands before him as a collection of clashing traits - the face of a girl with eyes that have seen Hell, the figure of a virgin with the body posture of experience, a complexion that demands dark hair with golden.

Complaining doesn't do any good," I pointed out. "If the person you complain to is the kind who would listen, they've already done what they can, and anyone else either won't listen, doesn't care, or can't do anything.

Most people don't care who rules, as long as their lives don't change.

People are looking for someone to blame. Our heritage comes from two groups who always denied that they were part of the problem. The early ecologists blamed industrialization for environmental degradation even while they continued to purchase all the goods and services produced by industry. And the forerunners of the parashintos always looked down on and isolated strangers.

To that which is born, death is certain; to that which is dead, birth is certain.