Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale – below cost at a fat profit. We got along.
The Japanese have five different ways to say ‘thank you’ – and every one of them translates literally as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English had the same built-in honesty on this point! Instead, English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing. ‘Gratitude,’ for example.
The second point I want to make is that you are right; the boy does indeed have to learn human customs. He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism. But, child, by the myriad deceptive aspects of Ahriman, don’t brainwash him in the process. Make sure he is cynical about each part of it.
But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!
If I choose to dine with publicans and sinners, that is my business. But I do not choose to break bread with Pharisees.
It is not nonsense and nobody asked you; you aren’t competent to have an opinion about it.
A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.
Never appeal to a man’s better nature. He may not have one.
Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad – but not before.
I’m not feisty. But when you’re as small as I am and female if you don’t stand up for your rights, you’re sure to be pushed around by big, hairy, smelly men with delusions about male superiority.
Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him.
Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them.
Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth – you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.
If I’ve reached the place where I’m a good influence on anybody, it’s time I cultivated some new vices.
A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.
The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy.
I don’t know,” he had answered grimly, “except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ’child psychologists.
But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.
Yes, yes, I know they make better pilots than men do; their reactions are faster, and they can tolerate more gee. They can get in faster, get out faster, and thereby improve everybody’s chances, yours as well as theirs. But that still doesn’t make it fun to be slammed against your spine at ten times your proper weight. But.
But today ‘liberal’ means to me a person who wants to pass laws and use coercion to force other people to live in his notion of utopia – the world ‘liberal’ no longer seems to have any connection with its root ‘free’ – it always means ‘Pass another law! Make the bastard do it our way.’ Whereas my solution to almost everything is ‘Let’s repeal that law’ or, possibly, ‘Let’s not do anything – let’s wait.