H. Beam Piper quotes

You know, it's quite all right to give the underdog a hand, but only one hand. Keep the other hand on your pistol - or he'll try to eat the one you gave him! (H. Beam Piper)

Keep a goverment poor and weak and it's your servant; when it is rich and powerful it becomes your master.

H. Beam Piper

Apparently, on New Texas, killing a politician was not malum in se, and was mallum prohibitorum only to the extent that what happened to the politician was in excess of what he deserved.

H. Beam Piper

English is the product of a Norman warrior trying to make a date with an Anglo-saxon bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.

H. Beam Piper

There's something wrong with democracy. If there weren't, it couldn't be overthrown by people like Makann, attacking it from within by democratic procedures. I don't think it's fundamentally unworkable. I think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. It's not safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and remedy them.

H. Beam Piper

Young man,the conversation was between Lord Trask and myself. And when someone says something you don't understand,don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. What DO you mean Lord Trask?

H. Beam Piper

Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

H. Beam Piper

I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.

H. Beam Piper

Sanity, it would seem, was a dangerously contagious disease.

H. Beam Piper

Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.

H. Beam Piper

...the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any time-line--the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well. (H. Beam Piper)

Everything has to be at once for six-month-old puppies, six-year-old children, and reformers of any age.

H. Beam Piper

Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

H. Beam Piper