Joe Haldeman Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

CAROL: You don't care for the music?
JACQUE: Music! It's just a gimmick to sell lutes and flutes.

Joe Haldeman
Everybody rich and happy. She smiled. Also complacent and rather stupid, you may have noticed.

Joe Haldeman
I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.

Joe Haldeman
Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.

Joe Haldeman
It was making me a little queasy. Doctors don't seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

Joe Haldeman
Human nature does change, and the fact that we've developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise there would be no universe. Unless we're the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there's no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we're the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Somebody does have to be first.
But maybe the first is always the last.

Joe Haldeman
Maybe after the war we'll be civilized again. That's the way it has always happened in the past.

Joe Haldeman
Some are born crazy, Amelia said. Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us.

Joe Haldeman
Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn't true.

Joe Haldeman
She hadn't been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Joe Haldeman
I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely cowardice had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.

Joe Haldeman
Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.

Joe Haldeman
I never found anyone else and I don't want anyone else. I don't care whether you're ninety years old or thirty. If I can't be your lover, I'll be your nurse.

Joe Haldeman
One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.

Joe Haldeman
It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn't involuntary.

Joe Haldeman
Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

Joe Haldeman
Rationalism doesn't require belief, only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe.

Joe Haldeman
We did it with their government's foreknowledge and permission, of course—and there were no civilian casualties, equally of course. Once they're dead they're rebels.

Joe Haldeman
She smiled. I wouldn't mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?
I think it's a difference between you and merely sane people.

Joe Haldeman
Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems.

Joe Haldeman
If you asked him, he would say the only connection between free will and religion in his life was the fact that he hadn't set foot in a synagogue since he turned eighteen.

Joe Haldeman
You were a Jesuit?
Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass.

Joe Haldeman
Nobody else in that platoon can tell a Hamiltonian from a hamburger.

Joe Haldeman
Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there... the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

Joe Haldeman
It was an ideological war for some—the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.

Joe Haldeman
You're actually a soldier, he said to me, and you go along with this foolishness?
I didn't ask to be a soldier. And I can't imagine a peace as foolish as this war we're in.

Joe Haldeman
We're inferring from an absence of data, Jacque said. That's lousy science.

Joe Haldeman
A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Joe Haldeman