H. Beam Piper Quotes

I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.

Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.

English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.

Sanity, it would seem, was a dangerously contagious disease.

...you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids.

It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.

You mean, the people are armed?" Prince Bentrik was incredulous. "Great Satan, aren't yours?" Prince Trask was equally surprised. "Then your democracy's a farce, and the people are only free on sufferance. If their ballots aren't secured by arms, they're worthless.

Vengeance is a strange human motivation --- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature!

Keep a government poor and weak and it’s your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it’s your master.

I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.

He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he's going right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences and round-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance to foul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that's undemocratic.

a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of.

explanatory

You have ability and people who don't never forgive you for it. Your very existence is a constant reproach to them.

Everything has to be at once for six-month-old puppies, six-year-old children, and reformers of any age.

It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running.

Gresham's law, extended: Bad manners drive out good manners.

...that sounds like a real live issue to the people who don't think and have nothing to think with, which means a large majority of the voters.

Why not everybody make friend, have fun, make help, be good?

To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.

On Aditya, such would be unthinkable; on Aditya, everybody respects authority. Whether it's respectable or not.

There was another officer with him, considerably younger—Captain Foxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide.

Well, if a Little Fuzzy finds a door open, I’d like to know why he shouldn’t come in and look around.

There was an ancient word, originating in one of the lost languages of Pre-Atomic Terra—sixtifor. It meant, the basic, fundamental, question. Rovard Javasan, he suspected, had just asked the sixtifor.

Zealous statesmen perhaps did more mischief than anything in the Galaxy--with the possible exception of procrastinating soldiers. That could indicate the fundamental difference between statecraft and war.

Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates ... so how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or anything else ...?

these ideological cliques form in a government--or any other organization. Subordinates are always chosen for their agreement with the views of their superiors, and the extremists always get to the top and shove the moderates under or out.

Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

What I object to is the way you're raiding the Sword-Worlds." "You're crazy!" Basil Gorram exploded. "Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between Lord Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. What do you mean, Lord Trask?

Does the Convocation make the laws?" Erskyll asked. Hozhet was perplexed. "Make laws, Lord Proconsul? Oh, no. We have laws." There were planets, here and there through the Empire, where an attitude like that would have been distinctly beneficial; planets with elective parliaments, every member of which felt himself obligated to get as many laws enacted during his term of office as possible.

It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as Homo sapiens terra is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means.

Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?

It should belong to everybody. Let us call it the Commonwealth. That means something everybody owns in common." "Something everybody owns, nobody owns," Mykhyl Eschkhaffar objected. "Oh, no, Mykhyl; it will belong to everybody," Khreggor Chmidd told him earnestly. "But somebody will have to take care of it for everybody. That," he added complacently, "will be you and me and the rest of us here." "I believe," Yakoop Zhannar said, almost smiling, "that this freedom is going to be a wonderful thing. For us.

On Aditya," First Citizen Yaggo declared, "there are no classes, and on Aditya everybody works. 'From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.'" "On Aditya," an elderly Counselor four places to the right of him said loudly to his neighbor, "they don't call them classes, they call them sociological categories, and they have nineteen of them. And on Aditya, they don't call them nonworkers, they call them occupational reservists, and they have more of them than we do." "But of course, I was born a king," Ranulf said sadly and nobly. "I have a duty to my people." "No, they don't vote at all," Lord Koreff was telling the Counselor on his left. "On Durendal, you have to pay taxes before you can vote." "On Aditya the crime of taxation does not exist," the First Citizen told the Prime Minister. "On Aditya," the Counselor four places down said to his neighbor, "there's nothing to tax. The state owns all the property, and if the Imperial Constitution and the Space Navy let them, the State would own all the people, too. Don't tell me about Aditya. First big-ship command I had was the old Invictus, 374, and she was based on Aditya for four years, and I'd sooner have spent that time in orbit around Niffelheim."... "But if they don't have votes to sell, what do they live on?" a Counselor asked in bewilderment. "The nobility supports them; the landowners, the trading barons, the industrial lords. The more nonworking adherents they have, the greater their prestige." And the more rifles they could muster when they quarreled with their fellow nobles, of course. "Beside, if we didn't do that, they'd turn brigand, and it costs less to support them than to have to hunt them out of the brush and hang them." "On Aditya, brigandage does not exist." "On Aditya, all the brigands belong to the Secret Police, only on Aditya they don't call them Secret Police, they call them Servants of the People, Ninth Category.

You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I’ll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed.

Every hour or so, he looked at his watch, and it would be three or four minutes later.

they have a democracy, and they are letting the enemies of democracy shelter themselves behind democratic safeguards.

is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian.

I suppose there’s always a place for Judas, at any table.” *

Everybody seems to have money, but the government is always broke. Deficit spending--and always the vital social services for which the government has to spend money. The most vital one, of course, is buying votes to keep the government in power. And it gets harder for the government to get anything done.

The whole society is a slave hierarchy. Everybody curries favor with the echelon above, and keeps his eye on the echelon below to make sure he isn't being undercut. We have something not too unlike that, ourselves. Any organizational society is, in some ways, like a slave society.

Atrocity has a horrible facility for begetting atrocity.

If you don't like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like

a man killed committing a felony--and bombing and arson ought to qualify for that--is simply bought and paid for; his blood is on nobody's head but his own.

escape.

People have to learn to live with newly-discovered facts; if they don't, they die of them.

The unrealistic beliefs of diplomats are what soldiers die of,

Vengeance is a strange human motivation-- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature!

You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I'll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed.

Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it's your master.

if Rand was equal to Old

Young Mr. Conn Maxwell, who has just returned from Terra, needs no introduction to any of you," he began. Then, having established that, he took the next ten minutes to introduce Conn.

went across the more civilized Third

The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams.

In a religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts to himself.

At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionage—neither

Well, our operations are definable as robbery and murder," he agreed. "Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers.

Then the Yo-Yo was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying, "Gehenna with this fooling around! I'll fix the expurgated unprintability!

Well, that was one thing you had to give [Makann] credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that. Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody?

I wanted to find out why. But when Professor Dandrik saw what was happening, he became almost hysterical, and ordered the accelerator shut down as though he were afraid it would blow up in his face." "I think it has blown up in his face," Prince Travann said quietly.

Most of the Mardukans were laughing, now. Some of them were accusing him of being just too utterly ridiculous. "Why, the people are the Government. The people would not legislate themselves into slavery." He wished Otto Harkaman were there. All he knew of history was the little he had gotten from reading some of Harkaman's books, and the long, rambling conversations aboard ship in hyperspace or in the evenings at Rivington. But Harkaman, he was sure, could have furnished hundreds of instances, on scores of planets and over ten centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't known what they were doing, even after it was too late.

I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.

Simon, speaking as one sovereign prince to another, you have a lot to learn. You've learned one important lesson already, that a ruler must be willing to use force and shed blood to enforce his rule. You have to learn, too, that a ruler cannot afford to be guided by his fears of what people will say about him. Not even what history will say about him. A ruler's only judge is himself." Bentrik slid the transpex visor of his helmet up and down experimentally, checked the chambers of his pistol and carbine. "All that matters to me is the peace and well-being of Marduk. I'll have to talk it over with ... with my only judge. Well, let's go." The

Jeff’s quarters were small, but he’d done a lot with it over the last year and a half. The wall above his bed was covered with sheets of paper that he’d taped together, upon which he’d drawn an elaborate mural. Here was the Mars over which the Emperor had reigned: boat-like aircraft hovering above great domed cities, monstrous creatures prowling red wastelands, bare-chested heroes defending beautiful women with rapiers and radium pistols, all beneath twin moons that looked nothing like the Phobos and Deimos we knew. The mural was crude, yet it had been rendered with painstaking care, and was nothing like anything we’d ever seen before. That wasn’t all. On the desk next to the comp was the original Phoenix disk, yet Jeff hadn’t been satisfied just to leave it behind. A wire-frame bookcase had been built beside the desk, and neatly stacked upon its shelves were dozens of sheaves of paper, some thick and some thin, each carefully bound with hemp twine. Books, handwritten and handmade. I carefully pulled down one at random, gazed at its title page: EDISON’S CONQUEST OF MARS by Garrett P. Serviss. I put it back on the shelf, picked up another: OMNILINGUAL by H. Beam Piper. I placed it on the shelf, then pulled down yet another: THE MARTIAN CROWN JEWELS, by Poul Anderson. And more, dozens more… This was what Jeff had been

Great plagues from little microbes start.

If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs.

The settlers had come from a place in North America called Texas, one of the old United States. They had a lengthy history—independent republic, admission to the United States, secession from the United States, reconquest by the United States, and general intransigence under the United States, the United Nations and the Solar League. When the laws of non-Einsteinian physics were discovered and the hyperspace-drive was developed, practically the entire population of Texas had taken to space to find a new home and independence from everybody.

I was in that pleasant spot called, "Damned if you do and damned if you don't....

This story was rejected by two top-flight science-fiction editors for the same reason: "Too hot to handle." "Too dangerous for our book." We'd like to know whether or not the readers of Amazing Stories agree. Drop us a line after you've read

We don't let dogs snap at us. And when they do, we don't kick them, we shoot them!

fratricidally

Sometimes getting a job is harder than the job after you get it—and sometimes getting out of a job is harder than either!

NAUDSONCE Bishop Berkeley's famous question about the sound of a falling tree may have no standing in Science. But there is a highly interesting question about "sound" that Science needs to consider....