Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

Gardens were meant to be seen, smelled, walked through, grubbed in. A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.

He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.

I wonder if we should add a box to tick off -- Reason for travel: creepy planetary conquest... no, I suppose not.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Stupidity can be as bad as malice

It’s not that I’m not upset; it’s just that I’m too tired to run up and down the corridor screaming.

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

…the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

All true wealth is biological (Aral Vorkosigan)

Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

He's not too short. He's just... concentrated.

You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

And this was your friend?" Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.

The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.