44 Quotes by Daniel Polansky

The dangerous men were still asleep, their blades sheathed next to their beds. The really dangerous men had been up for hours, and their quills and ledgers were getting hard use.

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss’s watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you’d walk away with enough money to retire—though if you left him alive you wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss’s vanity was his sadism.

You got no business coming in here and playing the asshole.’ ‘I am an asshole, Sully. We haven’t even scraped the surface yet.

And indeed, it was not her steady hand that made Boudica the greatest sniper who had ever sighted down a target. Nor her eyes, eyes that had picked out the Captain long moments before anyone else could have even identified him as a mouse. It was that she understood how to wait, to empty herself of everything in anticipation of that one perfect moment - and then to fill that moment with death.

Thus far, the best that could be said for the day was that it was half over.

There is no position so critical, no office so important, that the occasional, and even the more than occasional, utter incompetent will not wind up filling it. Heart surgeons, popes, presidents, it makes no difference. Look around and you will see an existence replete with people who are betraying, in a most egregious manner, the powers and responsibilities that have been entrusted to them.

If the human race has ever invented an institution more effective in the propagation of intellectual and ethical cripples than the nobility, I have yet to stumble across it.

It’s a dangerous thing, pretense. A man ought to know who he is, even if he isn’t proud to be it.

Odd, but no matter how high you rise in the halls of power, it’s impossible to escape the conviction that our collective fates are largely determined by the petty jealousies of overgrown adolescents.