30 Quotes by H. Beam Piper

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.

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.

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