Nick Webb > Quotes

“We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards.”
― Nick Webb

“long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produces the same elegant solution, as if there were no choice in the matter?) We monkeys have”
― Nick Webb, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams

“Granger bounded towards the command console and tapped the video display showing the priority message received from CENTCOM. A zoomed-in image of Mars appeared, and a handful of grainy-looking ships snapped into orbit, decelerating at incredible speeds. After a brief battle with a handful of defending orbital patrol ships, a harsh white light appeared in the midst of the invading fleet. As the light intensified, the image started to pulse with static. Suddenly, the brilliant light disappeared in a flash.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“And it was gone—the super-carrier Justice. At least three thousand souls manning its gun crews, engine rooms, half a dozen flightdecks ... all gone in a brilliant, pixelated flash of light. The massive ship fractured into two main pieces, and the aliens, not content with the destruction, blasted the remaining larger half until it too exploded into several dozen smaller pieces.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“The old memories were making him angry, boiling up inside of him. That was good. It meant he was still alive. Dead men couldn’t fight. Only living men, fuming at injustice and enraged at the loss of their fellows, fought, and won wars. “Cap’n,”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“A few minutes later his XO appeared, saluting the marine guard as she crossed the threshold to the bridge, which sensibly resided deep within the armored core of the ship rather than being perched precariously on the top of the vessel like an old-style soda can on the fence, ready to be picked off as alien target practice.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“Reject the tribalism. Reject the calls to fight the other team. The other party. The other species. The other football club. The other family down the street that has a bigger interstellar corvette than you. Don’t demonize the other candidate. Don’t hate the opponent. Oppose them. Debate them. Disagree with them. But then, at the end of the day, break bread with them. Because I promise you this: we will all need each other again. And again. And again. Thank you.”
― Nick Webb, Liberty

“Jack Daniels. Damn, she broke out the good stuff for him.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“When you think you’re on the good side, you’re capable of unthinkable evil.”
― Nick Webb, Defiance

“Just because something is old, doesn’t mean we need to throw it away. What kind of society have we become, what happens to our values when we say that just because something or someone has been around a hell of a long time that they’ve outlived their usefulness? We become a society of vacant, immature materialists. Moving from one new thing on to the next. Devaluing age and experience.” He was talking about the Constitution, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was talking about himself as well.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“Dead men couldn’t fight. Only living men, fuming at injustice and enraged at the loss of their fellows, fought, and won wars.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“If you get mad at someone for being right, they’ll second-guess themselves constantly. If you yell at them for telling the truth, they’ll just lie next time.”
― Nick Webb, The Last Champion

“practically”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“Like a voter’s face saying, I may not like you, but I’ll vote for you anyway because you might give me something I want.”
― Nick Webb, Liberty

“The young man, barely out of IDF Academy himself, nodded. “Almost complete, sir. No abnormalities from the meta-space sensors, and all the EM frequencies are quiet. The meta-space discrepancy we read earlier must have been a ghost”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“up”
― Nick Webb, Warrior

“You can forget Proust and those stupid cakes. Beatles’ songs are more potent.”
― Nick Webb, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams

“Humans are tribalistic hypocrites who judge their enemies by their actions but themselves by their intentions.”
― Nick Webb, The Last Champion

“Last time I checked, your uniforms weren’t red, Commander,” he said, referencing a common joke among IDF officers. He didn’t even know the origin of the joke—he supposed it had something to do with British Redcoats during the American Revolution—but everyone understood it to mean you’re comically expendable.”
― Nick Webb, Legend

“astronomical units”
― Nick Webb, Warrior

“that—too busy playing football. I figured someone was….” He trailed off. Isaacson glanced up. “Was what?” “Never mind. Need anything else, sir? I”
― Nick Webb, Warrior

“And you know why I didn’t get those scans?” He looked back at the blanket-draped figure. “I was scared of dying. Terrified. Didn’t want to face it. Didn’t want to acknowledge it might happen—that I’d be forced to retire, confined to a hospital bed and get bed sores all over my ass. And then, boom. Nothing. No thoughts. No feeling. No existing. Just ... nothing.”
― Nick Webb, Constitution

“A day of infamy. It will forever be remembered among my people as our lowest moment. Our darkest time.”
― Nick Webb, Liberty

“It’s simultaneously hard and soft. Until you measure it—which he probably does often, hoping against hope to see something different than last time. But then the wave function collapses to something a little flaccid.”
― Nick Webb, Legend

“It was unavoidable. War was hell, and modern space warfare was fiery, brutal hell on an epic scale.”
― Nick Webb, Warrior

“Monsters. Almost cartoonishly evil-looking, like in the campy space movies of old. Only these looked far more sinister, more deadly, and more … well, just obviously evil than anything he’d ever seen. Mottled green and black skin, dripping with mucus in some places and hairy in others.  And ugly. Faces that bore a striking resemblance to what he imagined the offspring of a crocodile with a human baby-like face who’d had sex with a tortoise would look like, except the offspring had contracted leprosy, been badly burned, and beaten with a spiked club, and whose now open wounds had developed gangrene and only semi-”
― Nick Webb, Liberty

“When the danger came from within, the risk was always highest.”
― Nick Webb, Defiance

“No.” Her eyes were like chips of stone. “He died because the Telestines have enslaved us. He died for humanity.” He”
― Nick Webb, Mercury's Bane

“Memories seem to be stored using a variety of mysterious principles, so that you have to circle around and around, through misty clouds of association, before you can relocate some missing piece. It is easy to persuade yourself of the truth of something for which the only evidence is a strong urge to believe. Douglas”
― Nick Webb, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams

“Wonderful. Save the world, and all it earns you is suspicion and surveillance. Par for the course for IDF, Granger thought, grimly. It was a wonder Earth still existed after not one, but two alien invasions, given the level of rampant bureaucracy and mistrust and general incompetency. But”
― Nick Webb, Constitution