Lois McMaster Bujold Men Quotations

They stared at her curiously, and she caught snatches of conversation in two or three languages. It wasn't hard to guess their content, and she smiled a bit primly. Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range - and with a coup to plan for the end.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

It’s important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.

Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.

Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.

If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.

The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.

All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed.

There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.

I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself.

But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.

Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement.