Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Lois McMaster Bujold
628 quotes
“The trouble with synopsized information was that it was always so nebulous. The devil was in the details, the raw data; embedded therein were all the tiny clues that fed the intuition demon until it became strong and fat and, sometimes, grew up to become an actual Theory, or even a Proof.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suicide wasn’t an option for me anymore, I found. Not like good old adolescent angst. I’m no longer of the secret opinion that death will somehow overlook me if I don’t do something personally about it. And give life…it seems stupid not to make the most of what I do have. Not to mention deucedly ungrateful.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Their excitement was dampened by a genuine concern for their daughter’s safety and personal happiness, though they are certainly as puzzled how this is to be achieved as any other set of parents.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I despise internal investigations. Even if you win, you lose.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What are you doing?” the Countess asked.… “Just…wrestling with temptation.” Illyan’s voice came back, amused. “Who’s winning?” Miles’s eye followed the cracks in the plaster, overhead. His voice came out high and light, on a sigh: “I think…I’m going for the best two falls out of three.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I elect to be…myself.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we get straight truth in, maybe we’ve got half a chance of getting good judgment out. No damn chance otherwise, that’s for sure.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can’t trade for your heart’s desire is your heart.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was never a mercenary, not ever. Not for one single minute.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I am not my father. I don’t have to repeat his mistakes; I can invent bright-new ones.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You think he’s a genius?” she said, raising her eyebrows. The high Vor twit?” “I don’t know him quite well enough, yet. But I suspect so, a part of the time.” “Can you be a genius part of the time?” “All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People complaining about their spouses always looked and sounded so ugly.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Power corrupts, but we want energy.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’ll never know the whole truth, I suppose,” said Venier. Was that supposed to be a concession? “You can be told the whole truth all day long, but if you won’t believe it, then no, I don’t suppose you ever will never know it.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To this day she didn’t know if he taken her disgusted refusal to defend herself for a covert admission of guilt.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love was long gone, in her. She got by on a starvation diet of loyalty these days.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How could you tell the difference between not liking sex, and not liking the only person you’d ever done sex with? Yet she was almost desperate for touch, mere affection untainted by the indignities of the erotic.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cynicism did not seem nearly so impressively daring to her now as it had when she was twenty.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If suspicion was the deadliest possible insult, then trust was always right, even if it was mistaken.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does it seem strange…does it give you a very different view of your parents, to see them on vid?” “No,” he said. “It gives me a very different view of holovids.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They seem more like toys than jewels, but I have to admit, they’re striking.” “Oh, yes, a typical tech toy. High-end this year, everywhere next year, nowhere after that, till the antiquarians’ revival.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The laws of physics took precedence over heroic intent for the next couple of seconds.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once you had delegated the best people to do a job for you, you had to trust both them and your judgment.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not here to vent my feelings. I am here to achieve my goals.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the moment I have very little evidence and lots of theories. I’m itching to reverse the proportions.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a brute-force approach,” Miles said apologetically. “And not, alas, quite as simple as a data match.” “That,” murmured Gibbs, “is why enlisted men were invented.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Real expertise, the kind that means you can’t be intimidated or, or…persuaded to go along with something stupid because you think everyone in the universe knows more than you do.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aim high. You may still miss the target but at least you won’t shoot your foot off.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What an obituary. When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, “He didn’t hit me.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh hell. Have you fallen in love with this woman, idiot boy? Um. Yeah. He’d been falling for days, he realized in retrospect. It was just that he’d finally hit the ground.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just like swatting flies with a laser cannon. The aim’s a bit tricky, but it sure takes care of the flies.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which was was forward.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To get the right answer, one must first correctly frame the question.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She probably felt about matrimony the way Miles felt about needle-grenade launchers.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge might not be power, but ignorance was definitely weakness, and so was poverty.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One’s career might depend solely on one’s own efforts, but marriage was a lottery, and you drew your lot in late adolescence or early adulthood at a point of maximum idiocy and confusion. Perhaps it was just as well. If people were too sensible, the human race might well come to an end. Evolution favored the maximum production of children, not of happiness.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He consoled himself with the reflection that it was seldom he found himself in company who made him feel this stupid. It was probably good for his soul.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have you determined if it is meant to be a weapon at all?” she said. “We’ve got some very dead people to account for,” Miles pointed out. “That, alas, does not necessarily require a weapon.” Professor Vorthys said. “Carelessness, stupidity, haste, and ignorance are quite as powerfully destructive forces as homicidal intent.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People have some very odd illusions about power. Mostly it consists of finding a parade and nipping over to place yourself at the head of the band. Just as eloquence consists of persuading people of things they desperately want to believe. Demagoguery, I suppose, is eloquence sliding to some least moral energy level.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you could go back in time and change things… The only moment in time you could change things was the elusive now, which slipped through your fingers as fast as you could think about it.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hostage game is a bad game, a sad and ugly game that’s a lot easier to start than end. The worst versions I’ve seen ended up with neither side in control, or getting anything they wanted. And the people who stand to lose the most in it frequently aren’t even playing.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He's not even a mad scientist. He's merely a very upset engineer.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m planning my course work for the next session at university. I was too late to start this summer, so I’ll begin in the fall. There’s so much to choose from. I feel so ignorant.” “Educated is what you aim to be coming out, not going in.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The parents of the preceding generation had taken galactic sex-selection technologies much too far in their foolish passion for male heirs, and the very sons they’d so cherished—Miles’s contemporaries—had inherited the resulting mating mess. Go to any formal party in Vorbarr Sultana these days, and you could practically taste the damned testosterone in the air, volatilized by the alcohol no doubt.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He couldn’t make this go faster by pushing harder.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then time ran out—no. Time ran on. There was no end to time. But you come to the end of yourself, and time runs on, and leaves you.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why are you here, Ivan?” He added under his breath, “and why couldn’t three bodyguards keep you out? Do I have to give orders to shoot to kill?” “My strength is great because my cause is just,” Vorpatril informed him. “My mother has sent me with a list of chores for you as long as my arm. With footnotes.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source