By Other Means Quotes

“Communism worked great, up to maybe four dozen people. Libertarianism was a bit better and could handle thousands before it started to fall apart. Capitalism worked best on scale, but it too began to implode once you moved close to the billion mark or so and began to factor in multiple local governments. Socialism always sucked and tended to work like a glacier moving uphill, but it worked at pretty much every scale in the same way. It was reliable, even if you could only rely on it to piss you off and barely get anything done.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“Censorship was never about morality; it was about fear.”
― Evan Currie, By Other Means

“It was always better to have friends in low places, often far better, than having them in high places. At least when it came to Sorilla’s line of work. Friends in high places tended to forget your name as soon as things got inconvenient, but she’d been consistently surprised by how loyal thugs and thieves could be in the right circumstances. They might literally stab you in the back, true, but they’d never just forget your name and ignore you in a crisis. Sorilla learned a long time past that she preferred an honest betrayal over a political one.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“was the first step before any sort of action. You learned as much as you could about the government you were dealing with, because you couldn’t determine what kind of action, if any, was required without doing just that.”
― Evan Currie, By Other Means

“spacers weren’t that far removed from their sailing ancestors, and the idea itself was insidious.”
― Evan Currie, By Other Means

“realist. Better the shadow of truce than the fog of war.”
― Evan Currie, By Other Means

“willing to bet that innovation was the strength of the Alliance design, something that often seemed stilted by the ever increasingly complicated laws of Earth.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“She was striking, she was unforgettable, and she was terrifying. Those were words that applied just fine to the major.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“Insanity had its place, and that place was generally when all the sane options had been exhausted.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“She’d been desperate, more times than she cared to remember, and knew that it took a certain level of real oppression to bring out violence from desperation.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“Bombs were generally the tools of cowards or the desperate, those who either had no stomach for looking their opponents in the eyes or those who were so outclassed that honor had become a dangerous and entirely unaffordable affectation.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“Sorilla wasn’t going to pretend that she understood how political discourse worked, but her idea of negotiation took five minutes and generally involved violence or the threat of violence if it lasted much longer.”
― Evan C. Currie, By Other Means

“Francis Marion, not tales of martyrdom,” she countered. “Give me a choice between failure and death, I’ll pick failure any day… I’ve never met a test I couldn’t retake, and I’ve never failed the same test twice.”
― Evan Currie, By Other Means