Best 15 quotes of H. Beam Piper on MyQuotes

And when someone makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

Apparently, on New Texas, killing a politician was not malum in se, and was mallum prohibitorum only to the extent that what happened to the politician was in excess of what he deserved.

English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.

English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.

I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.

Keep a goverment poor and weak and it's your servant; when it is rich and powerful it becomes your master.

Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

Sanity, it would seem, was a dangerously contagious disease.

Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.

Vengeance is a strange human motivation --- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature!

You know, it's quite all right to give the underdog a hand, but only one hand. Keep the other hand on your pistol - or he'll try to eat the one you gave him!

It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.

Well, if a Little Fuzzy finds a door open, I’d like to know why he shouldn’t come in and look around.

Well, that was one thing you had to give [Makann] credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that. Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody?

You mean, the people are armed?" Prince Bentrik was incredulous. "Great Satan, aren't yours?" Prince Trask was equally surprised. "Then your democracy's a farce, and the people are only free on sufferance. If their ballots aren't secured by arms, they're worthless.