Author: James Wesley Rawles

“In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.” – Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

“Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.” – Jerry Pournelle, in a reply to a reader’s e-mail in Chaos Manor Mail #141, February 19-25, 2001

“A man and his tools make a man and his trade.” Vita Sackville-West, A Saxon Song, in The Independent Vol. 110 (1923); also in Collected Poems (1934)

“Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.” – Zig Ziglar as quoted in Trigger Events – How To Find Your Next Customer (2007) by Alen Majer

“Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger.” – Gordon Dickson, Tactics of Mistake

“Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” – William Goldman, in The Princess Bride (1973) and the film The Princess Bride (1987)

“Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain react.” – David Brin, Earth

“It’s said that ‘power corrupts’, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.” – David Brin, The Postman

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur, in a lecture at the University of Lille (7 December 1854)

“What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,—with a hinge in it.” – Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden (1870)