Paternus Quotes

“Anyone can plan, but a good strategist thrives under conditions of uncertainty, views setbacks not as failures but fresh opportunities to reexamine probabilities, reevaluate possibilities, adapt to emergent contingencies and exploit them to his advantage. Remain flexible in all things. Keep the bigger picture in mind. And expect the unexpected.”
― Dyrk Ashton, Paternus: The Complete Trilogy

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the initiation of a new order of things.”
― Dyrk Ashton, Paternus: The Complete Trilogy

“It is kind of sad that the watoto are so easily duped, but this simplistic perception of theirs is also the primary reason they’ve survived as a species. There are advantages to going though life with blinders on. If at any time throughout their existence they had full comprehension of how truly vulnerable they were, any real inkling of the odds against their survival, they may have just lain down to die. Thanks to their unlikely combination of qualities, however, being at once brilliant and ignorant, adaptable yet naïve, and most of all tenacious, they’ve now reached the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder. Well, almost.”
― Dyrk Ashton, Paternus: The Complete Trilogy

“Mtoto perception is very practical and became more so as they evolved, governed by their sensory-motor schema of stimulus-response, action-reaction and habitual recognition – essentially, the need to immediately make sense of what their senses bring to them and determine its use value or whether it is friend or foe. This also, however, limits them. They have a very hard time seeing what they don’t understand or have never seen before.”
― Dyrk Ashton, Paternus: The Complete Trilogy