Abaddon's Gate (Expanse, #3)

by James S.A. Corey

What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context.

“That’s the kind of stealing only governments can get away with,”

Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience. That had been replaced with the idea that only measurable and testable concepts had value.

It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.

But the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they should do something just because they can do it.

Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.

If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur.

Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”

Charting the course of a life was making a map of the ways each event changed the person, leaving someone different on the other side.

Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”

Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.

He tried to decide whether he regretted dying, but the truth was he was too fucking tired to care.

A man generally regarded as the instigator of two solar system–wide wars got all this information from a protomolecule-created ghost that no one else can see. It wasn’t a particularly compelling argument.

Families would be waiting for her to bring their loved ones home, only to receive flags, posthumous medals, letters of sympathy. It wouldn’t be enough to fill the holes those lost people left in their lives. It was never enough.

She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.