Bear Head Quotes

“And your worker who ‘kisses ass’ is seen as management material not because they give their all to the company, but because they spend that effort they would otherwise give to the company on looking like they give it all to the company. They spend it on all the little social games instead, and because effort spent on the metagame is focused entirely about the appearance of virtue, it overshadows those who are actually performing the primary task, it overshadows actual virtue. And this is how human hierarchical structures end up working. This is why the people who end up in authority are generally not those focused on whatever the purpose of the community is, but those who are focused on achieving positions of authority. This is why you have career politicians, why administrators end up pulling ten times the salary of a surgeon or an academic under their administration, why performing well in an exam or a test is not actually the same as being good at the thing the exam is supposed to be testing. Because the metagame outweighs the game.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“Sometimes the fear came because you were scared of looking into the eye of the monster and seeing your own reflection.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“I could do such things, what they are I yet know not, but they would be the terror of the Earth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“Dictators don’t make the trains run on time, Rufus. They run down the rail networks because they travel in private planes.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“You think you’re imposing order by tightening the vice, cracking down, police on the streets, curfews and stop-and-search and let’s-see-your-ID. Except, you look at any place and time when that’s been instituted, you tell me whether history records those as havens of peace and stability. You show me when top-down imposition of order has done anything except fan the flames.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“He didn’t trust them, because he didn’t trust anyone who might at some point harbour any thought that didn’t orbit him.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“I mean, probably you’re after a blow by blow. Moving the pieces about the war table, telling you who duelled who like King goddamn Arthur against Abe Lincoln. But man, I was hiding. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. And I was doing my part by bringing Honey to the table. If something happened to me it’d be game over. So hiding was my bit, really. A real and solid contribution to the game plan.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“You don’t have to be a good person. That’s OK. But you’re entitled to be your own person.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“Jimmy: “What, you’re my goddamn drugs counsellor now, are you?” Honey: “I’m still working out precisely who I am. But we’re getting there. I have a name.”
Jimmy: “Is it Her Majesty Royal Pain In My Ass?”
Honey: “Dear me, what an impoverished vocabulary you have. You can call me Honey.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“I did a good job and I liked it. Then I got bored and stopped doing so good a job. Now I get the crap jobs because, like plenty others, I just stopped giving a shit. Because there is not much to do on Mars.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“I mean, probably you’re after a blow by blow. Moving the pieces about the war table, telling you who duelled who like King goddamn Arthur against Abe Lincoln. But man, I was hiding. It’s what I do.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“It just meant a bigger room and more arguing voices. And every one of those voices was beholden to constituents and special interests groups and, frankly, whoever was paying for their mistresses and houses and yachts.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“How many institutions were quietly installing Hierarchies into the heads of people like this assistant to ensure their loyalty. And what other walks of life had started to experiment with people who were infinitely compliant, infinitely discreet. It made me feel sick to realise how far the pendulum had already swung back, and I never knew.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“For what it’s worth he wasn’t the political tyrant I’d been expecting, but well-meaning men can cause just as much damage, if not more.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“We’ll roll back the chains they put on you, today, tomorrow, in a generation’s time. Because the generation that held those chains are yesterday’s men, trying to hold on to power by whipping up fear of the other, just like always. But we’ll beat them. And yes, I will continue to do my part in that.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“The worsening climate, the mass displacement, the shortages, that was poor-people problems.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“Jagged ends of memories, like a jigsaw made of broken glass. Cut yourself to ribbons trying to piece it back together but then you're the glass as well as the hands so why not a little blood?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“Nobody believed anyone over Thompson, not in the end. Not even when they knew he was lying. Not even when the lies were tissue-thin.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“You’re a parasite. You’re the worm in humanity’s apple.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“He was an ingeniously evolved parasite, the scion of a strain honed over generations to fool wider humanity into following his orders and tending to his needs.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“This is why the people who end up in authority are generally not those focused on whatever the purpose of the community is, but those who are focused on achieving positions of authority. This is why you have career politicians, why administrators end up pulling ten times the salary of a surgeon or an academic under their administration, why performing well in an exam or a test is not actually the same as being good at the thing the exam is supposed to be testing. Because the metagame outweighs the game.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“All these things I remembered, and I remember thinking how it seemed like, no matter whether the groundswell of negative opinion was coming out of Australia or Germany, Beijing or Hyderabad, it always seemed to be the same class of people hiding behind it, reaping the benefits.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“Or easier to give up yourself and be no more than a limb, an organ of the whole. But easy isn’t better. It’s like being more than a part of something that’s more than the sum of its parts.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head

“He suggested, he denied, he made outrageous statements that contained so many layers of nested fabrications that you couldn’t ever unpick them all; you ended up tacitly accepting three-quarters of the lies he told in your quest to undo the other 25 per cent. And then the dust settled and everyone loved what he had to say, even though he hadn’t quite said it.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head