Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.

Paolo Bacigalupi
You're saying that you yoked the world to your patented grains and seeds, happily enslaved us all—and now you finally realize that you are dragging us all to hell.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.

Paolo Bacigalupi
I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?

Paolo Bacigalupi
She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.

Paolo Bacigalupi
It's still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we'd be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We'd be rich and they'd be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They're all full of it. Nothing balances out.

Paolo Bacigalupi
She'd survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn't anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She'd looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she'd survived.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit. We went down that path once, and it brought us to ruin.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Paolo Bacigalupi
If you bargain when they squeeze your balls, they will only squeeze again.

Paolo Bacigalupi
But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Paolo Bacigalupi
They'd blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they'd still blame you.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

Paolo Bacigalupi
If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Paolo Bacigalupi
I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.

Paolo Bacigalupi
The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you'd ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Paolo Bacigalupi
If you act like a servant, you will die like a dog.

Paolo Bacigalupi
At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water—right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.

Paolo Bacigalupi
We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Every time he makes plans for his future, he seems to fail. Every time he reaches forward, the world leans against him, pressing him down.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.

Paolo Bacigalupi
The symbol for the Environment Ministry is the eye of a tortoise, for the long view—the understanding that nothing comes cheap or quickly without a hidden cost.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.

Paolo Bacigalupi
All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it.

Paolo Bacigalupi