Space Viking

“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.””

— H. Beam Piper

“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!””

— H. Beam Piper

“It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as Homo sapiens terra is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means.””

— H. Beam Piper

“Every hour or so, he looked at his watch, and it would be three or four minutes later.””

— H. Beam Piper

“fratricidally””

— H. Beam Piper

“Simon, speaking as one sovereign prince to another, you have a lot to learn. You've learned one important lesson already, that a ruler must be willing to use force and shed blood to enforce his rule. You have to learn, too, that a ruler cannot afford to be guided by his fears of what people will say about him. Not even what history will say about him. A ruler's only judge is himself." Bentrik slid the transpex visor of his helmet up and down experimentally, checked the chambers of his pistol and carbine. "All that matters to me is the peace and well-being of Marduk. I'll have to talk it over with ... with my only judge. Well, let's go." The””

— H. Beam Piper

“I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.””

— H. Beam Piper

“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?””

— H. Beam Piper

“Most of the Mardukans were laughing, now. Some of them were accusing him of being just too utterly ridiculous."Why, the people are the Government. The people would not legislate themselves into slavery."He wished Otto Harkaman were there. All he knew of history was the little he had gotten from reading some of Harkaman's books, and the long, rambling conversations aboard ship in hyperspace or in the evenings at Rivington. But Harkaman, he was sure, could have furnished hundreds of instances, on scores of planets and over ten centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't known what they were doing, even after it was too late.””

— H. Beam Piper