67 Quotes by Jack Campbell

Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. I’m not even a god.

The longstanding thorn in your side Captain Numos is stupid. In fact, Numos is so dense that I’m surprised he doesn’t have his own event horizon.

Courage, real bravery, is being afraid and doing what you need to do anyway.

There are things we don’t do. From this moment forth, let us all ensure our every action reflects well on us and our ancestors. Let us live to the highest standards, lest we win this war only to find ourselves staring in the mirror at the face of our late enemy.

Sir, winning is usually a matter of making one less mistake than the enemy or just getting up one more time than you get knocked down.

Deplorable practices adopted during the last century were repeatedly declared necessary if regrettable in order to win the war. Oddly enough, we’ve yet to win. You’d think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven’t actually produced the promised results.

We should have suspected that nonhumans were involved right from the start when the activation process didn’t involve a lot of arcane commands that had to be done in just the right order, and the destination was displayed as a name rather than using some counterintuitive code. No human software engineer would produce a device that easy to use.

Sagas wouldn’t be interesting if terrible things didn’t happen to the people in them.

Mari took one more look at the Mechanic boiler, bit her lip, then looked at him. “I’m going to say this because in another minute we may be dead, and I don’t want to die not having told you. I love you.