David Drake > Quotes

“Anytime you're afraid to try something new...just remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic.”
― Drake

“The use of force is always an answer to problems...[It] isn't an attractive answer, though.”
― David Drake, The Voyage

“History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.”
― David Drake, Patriots

“Nothing’s boring if it’s in your soul…”
― David Drake, The Sharp End

“Adventure is somebody else in deep shit, far, far away,”
― David Drake, Hope Renewed

“Her sanity was perhaps an unwarranted assumption.”
― David Drake, With the Lightnings

“As my Uncle Theodosius always said: never chase women who are a lot smarter than you. You won't catch them, or, what's worse, you might.”
― David Drake, An Oblique Approach

“Arrogance wasn't the same thing as stupidity, but it tended to have similar results.”
― David Drake, The Far Side of the Stars

“A good officer can get away with being wrong, but he can't be indecisive.”
― David Drake, Some Golden Harbor

“First initiative, then life.”
― David Drake, With the Lightnings

“To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,” “Gentlemen-Rankers,” Barrack Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling”
― David Drake, Into the Maelstrom

“Logic wasn't the governing factor here. It rarely is in human affairs.”
― David Drake, The Reaches

“Lieutenant Daniel Leary ambled through the streets of Kostroma City in the black-piped gray 2nd Class uniform of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. He was on his way to the Elector's Palace, but there was no hurry and really nothing more important for Daniel to do than to savor the fact that he'd realized one of his childhood dreams: to walk a far world and see its wonders first hand.”
― David Drake, With the Lightnings

“A fire department isn't a waste of tax money, even if those assigned to it spend most of the time washing their cars.”
― David Drake, Though Hell Should Bar the Way

“The main entrance was off a closed court, not the street Perennius had been following. He paused on the corner, sighed and cinched up his equipment belt. The agent was used to palaces, to great houses, to headquarters of many sorts; but he had never felt comfortable in this one. It occurred to him that it was because he had no real business there. There were Imperial agents and informers throughout Rome, and no doubt the Emperor had as much need for them here as he did for them anywhere else in the Empire.”
― David Drake, Birds of Prey

“End note to The Day of Glory The Hammer's Slammers series isn't in any sense a future history. It's made up of individual stories exploring one aspect or another of what war means to the men and women at the sharp end. In these stories I've been translating into an SF setting what I learned in 1970 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet-Nam and Cambodia. We—the Blackhorse—were an elite unit. I was very fortunate to have been assigned to a regiment in which you never had to worry if the guy next to you was going to do his job: he was, and so were you—whatever you thought of war or The War or our Vietnamese allies. (Generally the answer to all those questions was, "Not much.") The flip side was that the distinction between the categories Not Blackhorse and Enemy got blurred. We didn't view our job as winning hearts and minds: we were there to kill people and then go home. And we didn't much care about the cost of victory so long as somebody else was paying it. That's something civilians ought to consider long and hard before they send tanks off to make policy. Because I can tell you from personal experience, it isn't something the tankers themselves are likely to worry about.”
― David Drake, Other Times Than Peace

“Opposition to the current ruler doesn’t make one a traitor to the state,”
― David Drake, Lt. Leary, Commanding

“The things other people said or did would always give room to take offense, if you were of a mind to take offense. Therefore the fault wasn’t in the other people.”
― David Drake, What Distant Deeps

“Danger is another thing that's more romantic to read about than the reality of blood and burns and the screams transcending age and gender and even humanity. Pain can be a sound, pure sound, and pictures can't prepare you for the smell of a man trying to stuff his intestines back into his ripped abdomen.”
― David Drake, The Way to Glory

“Many times information was most effective when it wasn't used. The same was true of any other weapon.”
― David Drake, The Far Side of the Stars

“So long as authority comes only from having a hand on a throat, wisdom and mercy are a moot point.”
― David Drake, Hope Reformed

“You take more flies with honey than vinegar, Hogg.” Hogg snorted. “And what’s a fly’s pelt worth, young master?” he said.”
― David Drake, With the Lightnings

“Life's a forge, boy, and the purest metal comes from the hottest fire.”
― David Drake, The Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 1

“The tablet had been sealed with the general Bureau signet, a seated woman holding a small sheaf of wheat. It was a hold-over from the days a century before when the organization had officially been the Bureau of Grain Supply. The seal within, at the close of the brusk orders, was a personal one. It impressed in the wax a low relief of a man gripping the steering oar of a ship. Though the guards might never have seen the seal in use before, they knew it for that of Marcus Optatius Navigatus. Navigatus was head of the Bureau, formally the equal of a provincial fiscal officer in authority and informally more powerful than most governors … because he directed men like Aulus Perennius.”
― David Drake, Birds of Prey

“It's all right for a leader to be ruthless, Adele thought. He shouldn't be whimsical, though, and he especially shouldn't be whimsically ruthless.”
― David Drake, In the Stormy Red Sky

“Dogs don’t need philosophies, they just fight. It seems to me that men do the same, though they usually come up with reasons. Justice is a good one.”
― David Drake, The Spark

“Wars are dangerous places, aren’t they?
But of course, you can slip in the bath and break your neck.”
― David Drake, Lt. Leary, Commanding

“a man with the power to punish anyone never hears anything except what he wants to hear. or, what’s worse, what his subordinates think he wants to hear—and they don’t dare ask him what it is.”
― David Drake, Hope Reformed

“People like to think that their convenience is important. Daniel had found that as a general rule the universe didn’t agree, and that other human beings tended to be a subset of ‘the universe’ in this regard.”
― David Drake, Death's Bright Day

“can't fix the roof when it's raining, and when the sun comes out the roof don't leak no more." The”
― David Drake, Lt. Leary, Commanding