Uncompromising Honor (Honor Harrington, #14)

by David Weber

And even more so for the imagination of a little boy who’d realized even then that ships had souls. That anything that lovely, that graceful—anything that many men had given so much of themselves to—had to be alive itself.

“one day we’ll all be in the history books and some idiot child—just like the idiot children you and I were, once upon a time—will dream about how exciting and glorious it all must have been. Maybe they’ll be luckier than we are and not find out how wrong they are.”

Never apologize for grief. For honoring the memory of people you’ve lost by admitting how much they meant to you when you had them.”

“The real trick to slanting a story,” she’d told him, “is less the way you record it than what you choose to record—or not—in the first place.” She’d smiled over her beer mug and reached for another pretzel. “Leave out the right things, and you can make Buddha or Jesus sound like Attila the Hun without ever misquoting him once!”

People at the apex felt unbridled contempt for the people who spent their lives laboring to support their “betters” in the style to which they had become accustomed. After all, if those lesser being had mattered, they’d have been the ones making the decisions, right? The fact that they weren’t was directly attributable to their inherent inferiority and general stupidity, not the inequality of opportunity.

They’re human beings, and the two things humans make are tools…and mistakes.