Matthew Stover quotes

When you save someone's life. It's always temporary, y'know? (Matthew Stover)
All true stories end in death.
Matthew Stover
A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world--something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear--is nothing but a cheap hustle.
Matthew Stover
I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.
Matthew Stover
Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth.
Matthew Stover
A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.
Matthew Stover
We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.
Matthew Stover
Can't trust a fascist--truth is always your first sacrifice to the welfare of the state.
Matthew Stover
Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be.
Matthew Stover
Reasons are for peasants.
Matthew Stover
The problem with happy endings," Tan'elkoth said, "is that nothing is ever truly over. (Matthew Stover)
...I suspect that pain means little to you as your life--but both your life and your pain are very important to me.
Matthew Stover
Here was the weapon of a hero. A real hero. Not a playactor. Not a pretend-hero, like Ganner had always been. But this weapon was now in Ganner's hand.
Matthew Stover
They lit us up! Missiles incoming! Six count, closing, dead astern!" "Back-trace the missile lock and feed it to the computer for counter-fire." "Great idea! I'll get right on that first thing as soon as I graduate from gunnery school!
Matthew Stover
Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other.
Matthew Stover
Caine was no longer the icon of evil, the Enemy of God, the author of all the world's ills. He had become simply what he was: a ruthless, amoral man, now beaten--crushed by the world, just like any other.
Matthew Stover
Anyone who is of a thoughtful, philisophical cast of mind will occasionaly be struck by the appearance of certain organizing principles of history. The forms these principles seem to take inevitably depends upon one's specific obsession. For a mornachist, history is a struggle of classes of economic civil war. An agriculturalist sees the dynamic of populations, land, and availability of food; a philosopher might speak of the will to power or the will to sythesis; a theologian of the will of God.
Matthew Stover
I respect what is repectable," Tan'elkoth replied. "To ask for respect where none has been earned is childish maundering.And what is repectable, in the end, save service? Even your idol Jefferson is, in the end, measured by how well he served the species. The prize of individualism--its goal--is self-actualization, which is only another name for vanity. We do not admire men for achieving self-actualization; we admire self-actualization when its end result is a boon to humanity.
Matthew Stover
Depa is right: Jedi are insane." "Ever since I came to this planet, people have been telling me how crazy I am. They've told me this so many times that I had started to wonder if it might be true. Now, though, I understand: you don't say this because it's true. Not even because you think it's true. You say it because you hope it's true. Because if I am insane, you aren't really the revolting slime-hearted vermin that, down deep, you know you are.
Matthew Stover
Jedi are supposed to stand for something, aren't you? You're supposed to stand up for what's right. No matter what.
Matthew Stover
The first thing they did was pick up survivors. Because we are equipment, too. As long as the Republic takes care of us, we'll take care of it. (Matthew Stover)
I gave them the word of a Jedi Master that if they surrendered I would keep them from harm. I will not be made a liar.
Matthew Stover
But... but... you can't fight the way things are..." "But we do. Every day. That's what Jedi are." "You can never win-" "We don't have to win. We only have to fight.
Matthew Stover
Mace flipped up a thumb. "You think being armed and ruthless means you can do whatever you want." He folded his thumb and flipped up his forefinger. "You think nobody will stand up to you when they're naked." He folded that one again and flipped up the next. "And you think you're going to look inside my bag."
Matthew Stover
This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defeating.
Matthew Stover