Steve Perry Quotes

Steve Perry is an American television writer and science fiction author.

✵ 31. August 1947

Works

The Man Who Never Missed

Steve Perry

The Man Who Never Missed

Steve Perry

Steve Perry: 43 quotes0 likes

Famous Steve Perry Quotes

“Okay, I need to go places and shoot people.”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 28

“Why is it people like us have to be the galaxy’s conscience?”

“If you can see a problem, and you have the ability to fix it, it becomes your responsibility. It’s always been that way.”
Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 27

“War had a way of making carpe diem seem valid no matter what you wanted to seize…”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 17

“When you worked in a profession whose tools included guns and bombs, death was always on the menu; only a matter of time until the order you placed arrived…”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 6

“Jo nodded. The Vastalimi were stoic about many things, death notwithstanding. People came and went, that was the way of it, and there was no need to be overly disturbed; nothing could be done to change the general pattern, only the individual ones. Everybody got onto the hoverbus, and eventually, everybody got off; the questions were, how long was the ride, and how did you leave?”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 5

“He had thought about it. Mostly, after the fantasies, he had let it go. It was done, history. No point in bumping into the furniture while looking back over your shoulder.”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 4

Steve Perry Quotes about time

“The good old days always seemed better in distant memory than they had actually been at the time.”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 4

“Droc was not particularly religious himself. If the gods responded to entreaties, they had never demonstrated it to him. Better his time was spent doing something that might work.”

Prologue
The Vastalimi Gambit (2013)

“What other paths were there? His studies had shown him that revolution and evolution were the only ways that societies ever truly changed. Revolution and evolution, built of a mix of education and violence and politics and compromise and self-interest and self-preservation. Certainly, history showed that rigid societies, like ancient dinosaurs, always died. The Confed was the biggest dinosaur ever, and while it was already dying and had been doing so for a long time, it would take many years before it finally fell. Any empire which had to hold its citizens in check with military force was far down the road to destruction. Which brought up another thought: what would replace the dead beast when it began to rot? What parasite would emerge from the corpse to try and breed itself into superiority?”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 132)

“He thought about the killing he’d seen, about his final participation in the slaughter on Maro. It still made him want to vomit, the thought of all those people ceasing to exist. Many religions had it that there was another life, another existence following the one known, but Khadaji held no faith in that idea. Maybe so, maybe not. It would be nice, but until it was proven, a person should make the best of his or her time on the physical plane.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (pp. 130-131)

“Nobody is a born killer. And nobody ever forgets the first time they get laid, nor the first time they spike somebody.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 16

Steve Perry Quotes

“Old enough to look as if he knew what to do, young enough to look as if he could do it.”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 4

“The loudest sound on a battle field was click! when you were expecting bang! It was a never-ending wonder: What was going to go wrong next?”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 3

“What they don’t know won’t hurt us…”

Source: The Tejano Conflict (2014), Chapter 3

“We aren’t looking for trouble.”

“Doesn’t mean you won’t find it.”
Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 24

“A large bomb obscures a lot of evidence.”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 18

“He understood the phenomenon, of how almost dying made you appreciate what life had to offer. And it was a potent drug, that feeling. Battle was not glorious. But surviving it? That was.”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 15

“Well. You were allowed to be young and stupid, when you were young and stupid, and if it didn’t do you in, you might get older and wiser.”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 11

“You’re not an ape, use a tool!”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 7

“Desire, she realized, was a thick fog that could completely obscure reality.”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 6

“But was it not you who used to tell me that the more you knew, the better? That knowledge was the sharpest fang?”

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 3

“When he saw me look her over, he hinted that she might be willing to, ah, stay behind and work out details of the contract with me personally, no matter how long it might take.”

Jo nodded. No surprise there. Sex had sold stuff ever since stuff had been around.
Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 3

“Never felt so alive as you did after you came out of a battle in one piece. And if you were dead? You wouldn’t feel that…”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 32

“Shoot at us, we will nuke you all and let God sort out your radioactive dust.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 31

“There are a lot of promises in the recycle bins of history.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 13

“If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 12

“Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 12

“It wasn’t a death wish. It was a see-how-close-you-can-get-and-live wish.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 12

“Young soldiers had a lot of expectations and fantasies about how it would be and what they would do and feel. Invariably wrong, those expectations.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 11

“Rich people seldom run amok; They hire somebody to do that for them.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 5

“Of course, laws weren’t always just. Some rules outlawed a thing because it was intrinsically bad: child molestation, say. Other rules made harmless activities crimes only because someone wished them to be so. Take cohabitation on a religious holiday. On some worlds, it was legal on one day, illegal the next, and on the third, okay once again. Khadaji could see no moral dilemma there.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 16 (p. 143)

“Could he use the same excuse as the Confed—the end justified the means? Sometimes it did, of course, but could one ethically justify using the same methods as a deplored enemy, in order to get it to stop?”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 132)

“Any type of violence initiated by one intelligent being against another was wrong. Killing violence was worse than any other kind. How could it be condoned? In his brief moment of cosmic bliss, Khadaji had seen the value of intelligent life. Man and his self-created mues were alone in the galaxy as evolved intelligence. Certainly, there were artificials—computers and genetically altered animals—but no aliens had been discovered above the level of an unaltered dog. It was a big galaxy, plenty of room for every human or neo-human, it wasn’t necessary to kill any of them!”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 131)

“The beast has long since stopped serving to become the master. The Confed did what governments were famed for: it made more government. To oppose it was treason, and worth death. Even a monster has fear.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 14 (p. 124)

“Khadaji only nodded. It didn’t matter to him if he passed the test or not. He wasn’t here to get a degree; he was here to learn.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 14 (p. 122)

“Older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser, Emile, but it does mean older. More…experienced. More adept at dealing with the galaxy, at…taking care of oneself.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 11 (p. 95; ellipses in the original)

“We of the Shroud tend to believe in teaching those things we know we can teach, and in affairs of the heart—or gonads—there are no real experts. Love, like zen, cannot be learned, only felt.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 87)

“The psychology of the religious experience has been well-researched and taped. There are many paths up the mountain—sensory deprivation or sensory overload—emotional response to stimuli or the lack thereof is common. Drugs, of course, from psychoactives to the more mundane depressants. Electropophy can bring it about, as can organic brain damage, lack or excess of oxygen, even sex can trigger it. And what it is, according to the science of man and mue, is a subjective mental state, somewhere to the left of hypnosis. A trick the mind plays on itself. A delusion, void of reality.”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 56-57)

“Civilization didn’t like surprises…”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 26

“In the land of the unarmed, the man with a rock was king.”

Source: The Ramal Extraction (2012), Chapter 25

“I mean, look, I just broke into your private files. If I were you, I’d be more than a little upset.”

Pen crinkled. “I’m not. It shows initiative.”

Chapter 14 (p. 113)
Matadora (1986)

“A woman did what a woman had to, the best way she knew how. To do more was impossible, to do less, unthinkable.”

Source: Matadora (1986), Chapter 1 (p. 5)

“Honor was in surviving, not fair play.”

Source: Matadora (1986), Chapter 1 (p. 4)

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