H. Beam Piper Quotes

Henry Beam Piper (1904-1964)

H. Beam Piper was an American science fiction author. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future History series of stories. (H Beam Piper Quotes)

“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.”
H. Beam Piper

“Everything has to be at once for six-month-old puppies, six-year-old children, and reformers of any age.”
H. Beam Piper

“He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he’s going right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences and round-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance to foul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that’s undemocratic.”
H. Beam Piper

“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.”
H. Beam Piper

“I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.”
H. Beam Piper

“It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running.”
H. Beam Piper

“Keep a government poor and weak and it’s your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it’s your master.”
H. Beam Piper

“Sometimes getting a job is harder than the job after you get it and sometimes getting out of a job is harder than either!”
H. Beam Piper

“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.”
H. Beam Piper

“The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams.”
H. Beam Piper

“To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.”
H. Beam Piper

“You have ability and people who don’t never forgive you for it. Your very existence is a constant reproach to them.”
H. Beam Piper

“You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I’ll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed.”
H. Beam Piper