Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes

The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

Any communitys arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

You try to give away what you want yourself.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

What you are is a question only you can answer.

Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.

You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.

There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.

A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement.

Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.

Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.