Starship Troopers

Key Takeaways

Two threads in a light annotation pass.

1. War as a subject of study rather than appetite. The marginalia pair Heinlein’s civics lectures with John Adams’ line on why he must study war — so that his sons may study mathematics and philosophy, and theirs painting and poetry. Heinlein’s franchise-through-service argument is read against that inheritance rather than on its own terms.

2. Cold War geopolitics called early. A note flags as “shocking” that a 1959 novel stages the decisive conflict as the United States versus China rather than the Soviet Union, with a Russia–US alignment and New Delhi as neutral ground.

Connections

• John Adams — the marginalia route Heinlein’s argument for civic obligation through Adams’ generational case for studying war.

Highlights

• You’ll kill only when you can’t help it. But the entire area we hit is to be smashed. I don’t want to see any of you loafers back aboard here with unexpended bombs. Get me?“
• I’ve heard tell that there used to be military outfits whose chaplains did not fight alongside the others, but I’ve never been able to see how that could work. I mean, how can a chaplain bless anything he’s not willing to do himself?
• „Just this, Johnnie. Don’t buy a farm. You know your job; do it. Just do it. Don’t try to win a medal.“
• a pilot who puts you down properly is a pilot who is smart and precise on retrieval.
• I had three more of the little A-rockets and I certainly didn’t intend to take any back with me. But I had had pounded into me that you must get your money’s worth with atomic weapons—it was only the second time that I had been allowed to carry them.
• (I’m no games-theory expert but I doubt if any computer could have analyzed what we were doing in time to predict where we would be next.)
• The range to the spaceport was extreme but I let the rocket see it, said, „Go find it, baby!“ and twisted its tail—slapped the last one in, sent it toward the nearer target, and jumped.
• As they keep telling you in Basic, doing something constructive at once is better than figuring out the best thing to do hours later.
• The beacon is a robot rocket, fired ahead of the retrieval boat, just a spike that buries itself in the ground and starts broadcasting that welcome, welcome music. The retrieval boat homes in on it automatically three minutes later and you had better be on hand, because the bus can’t wait and there won’t be another one along.
• I’ll say this for Captain Deladrier: they don’t make any better pilots. A rendezvous, boat to ship in orbit, is precisely calculated. I don’t know how, but it is, and you don’t change it. You can’t. Only she did. She saw in her scope that the boat had failed to blast on time; she braked back, picked up speed again—and matched and took us in, just by eye and touch, no time to compute it. If the Almighty ever needs an assistant to keep the stars in their courses, I know where he can look.
• Carl supplied the skull sweat and I carried out his instructions.
• If there were a war, I’ll be the first to cheer you on — and to put the business on a war footing. But there isn’t, and praise God there never will be again. We’ve outgrown wars. This planet is now peaceful and happy and we enjoy good enough relations with other planets. So what is this so called ‚Federal Service’? Parasitism, pure and simple. A functionless organ, utterly obsolete, living on the taxpayers. A decidedly expensive way for inferior people who otherwise would be unemployed to live at public expense for a term of years, then give themselves airs for the rest of their lives. Is that what you want to do?“
• However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral— doctrine that ‚violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.“
• One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.“
• No, I hadn’t made any decision; my mouth was leading its own life.
• Because it has become stylish, with some people — too many people—to serve a term and earn a franchise and be able to wear a ribbon in your lapel which says that you’re a vet’ran … whether you’ve ever seen combat or not. But if you want to serve and I can’t talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that’s your constitutional right. It says that everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren’t just glorified K. P. You can’t all be real military men; we don’t need that many and most of the volunteers aren’t number-one soldier material anyhow.
• „No offense. But military service is for ants. Believe me. I see ‚em go, I see ‚em come back—when they do come back. I see what it’s done to them. And for what? A purely nominal political privilege that pays not one centavo and that most of them aren’t competent to use wisely anyhow.
• The Fleet Sergeant looked over my papers and said glumly, „Apparently you both are almost insufferably healthy-except for holes in the head.
• But a neodog is not a talking dog; he is not a dog at all, he is an artificially mutated symbiote derived from dog stock. A neo, a trained Caleb, is about six times as bright as a dog, say about as intelligent as a human moron—except that the comparison is not fair to the neo; a moron is a defective, whereas a neo is a stable genius in his own line of work.“
• If the master is killed, we kill the neodog—at once! It is all that we can do for the poor thing. A mercy killing. If the neodog is killed … well, we can’t kill the man even though it would be the simplest solution. Instead we restrain him and hospitalize him and slowly put him back together.“
• Mmm … your instructor in History and Moral Philosophy seems to think well of you.“ „He does?“ I was surprised. „What did he say?“ Weiss smiled. „He says that you are not stupid, merely ignorant and prejudiced by your environment. From him that is high praise—I
• We’ll make a man of you—or kill you trying. Maybe both.“
• „The Infantry? Oh, you poor stupid clown! I feel sorry for you, I really do.“ I straightened up and said angrily, „Shut up! The Mobile Infantry is the best outfit in the Army — it is the Army! The rest of you jerks are just along to hand us the saw—we do the work.“ He laughed. „You’ll find out!“ „You want a mouthful of knuckles?“
• I made a very important discovery at Camp Currie. Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you’ve ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don’t need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he’s as happy as a worm in an apple—asleep.
• That’s what it was: surgery. Its immediate purpose was to get rid of, run right out of the outfit, those recruits who were too soft or too babyish ever to make Mobile Infantrymen.
• What’s the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?“
• War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him … but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing … but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose or the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people — ‚older and wiser heads,’ as they say — supply the control. Which is as it should be.
• A rifle is not an easy weapon; it’s got no target-seeking qualities at all— I understand that even back in the days when wars were fought and decided with just such rifles it used to take several thousand fired shots to average killing one man. This seems impossible but the military histories agree that it is true — apparently most shots weren’t really aimed but simply acted to force the enemy to keep his head down and interfere with his shooting.
• What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly … it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. • Thomas Paine
• Well, he would never be in public office now; he had taken his finger off his number for a single instant and he was through.
• Because he has to be flogged; neither you nor I can take it for him, even though the fault was ours. Because the regiment has to see what happens when nine-oh-eight-oh is violated. Our fault … but his lumps.“
• We must not hate them, we must not like them; we must teach them.
• You used to have one order that you gave to me over and over again when I was a boot. I got so that I loathed it almost more than anything else you did or said. Do you remember it? I do and now I’ll give it back to you: ‚Soldier, shut up and soldier!’
• How could anything her baby boy does anger his mother? You can hurt me, but you cannot make me love you the less. Wherever you are, whatever you choose to do, you are always my little boy who bangs his knee and comes running to my lap for comfort. My lap has shrunk, or perhaps you have grown (though I have never believed it), but nonetheless it will always be waiting, when you need it. Little boys never get over needing their mother’s laps—do they, darling? I hope not.
• You are now going through the hardest part of your service—not the hardest physically (though physical hardship will never trouble you again; you now have its measure), but the hardest spiritually … the deep, soulturning readjustments and re-evaluations necessary to metamorphize a potential citizen into one in being.
• The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.
• All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.
• The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human — ‚market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.“
• „This very personal relationship, ‚value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him … and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that ‚the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted … and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.
• „If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier … and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?“
• I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money—which is true—just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion … and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.“
• Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence („intelligence“ in the military meaning; a man in a suit can be just as stupid as anybody else only he had better not be), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability.
• Maybe they’ll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, and force it to surrender or die — without killing that gang of your own people they’ve got imprisoned down there. I wouldn’t know; I’m not a genius, I’m an M. I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job and I might be some help on it, too.
• Maybe someday they’ll get everything nice and tidy and we’ll have that thing we sing about, when „we ain’t a-gonna study war no more.“ Maybe. Maybe the same day the leopard will take off his spots and get a job as a Jersey cow, too. But again, I wouldn’t know; I am not a professor of cosmopolitics; I’m an M. I. When the government sends me, I go. In between, I catch a lot of sack time.

  Kyle: John Adams quote about why he must study war

• Don’t ask me to sketch the circuitry of a suit; I can’t. But I understand that some very good concert violinists can’t build a violin, either. I can do field maintenance and field repairs and check off the three hundred and forty-seven items from „cold“ to ready to wear, and that’s all a dumb M. I. is expected to do. But if my suit gets really sick, I call the doctor—a doctor of science (electromechanical engineering)
• And that is the beauty of a powered suit: you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to drive it, fly it, conn it, operate it; you just wear it and it takes its orders directly from your muscles and does for you what your muscles are trying to do. This leaves you with your whole mind free to handle your weapons and notice what is going on around you … which is supremely important to an infantryman who wants to die in bed.
• In a way, an administrative flogging is the mildest sort of a compliment; it means that your superiors think that there is a faint possibility that you just might have the character eventually to make a soldier and a citizen, unlikely as it seems at the moment.
• I found myself mulling over a discussion in our class in History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the XXth century. According to him, there was a time just before they went down the drain when such crimes as Dillinger’s were as common as dogfights. The Terror had not been just in North America—Russia and the British Isles had it, too, as well as other places. But it reached its peak in North America shortly before things went to pieces. „Law-abiding people,“ Dubois had told us, „hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably—or even killed. This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places — these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.“
• A park was a place for fun, not for getting hurt. As for getting killed in one — „Mr. Dubois, didn’t they have police? Or courts?“ „They had many more police than we have. And more courts. All overworked.“ „I guess I don’t get it.“ If a boy in our city had done anything half that bad … well, he and his father would have been flogged side by side. But such things just didn’t happen. Mr. Dubois then demanded of me, „Define a ‚juvenile delinquent.’ „ „Uh, one of those kids—the ones who used to beat up people.“ „Wrong.“ „Huh? But the book said—„ „My apologies. Your textbook does so state. But calling a tail a leg does not make the name fit ‚Juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms, one which gives a clue to their problem and their failure to solve it.
• Let’s get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class … and they often started their lawless careers much younger. Let us never forget that puppy. These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret—in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.“
• While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment—and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense.
• The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct.“ „Sir? But I thought—But he does! I have.“ „No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.
• Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.“ „But the instinct to survive,“ he had gone on, „can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your ‚moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive—and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.“
• „These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‚appeal to their better natures,’ to ‚reach them,’ to ‚spark their moral sense.’ Tosh! They had no ‚better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‚moral.’ „The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a…
• „Sir? How about ‚life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?“ „Ah, yes, the ‚unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‚right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‚right’ to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‚right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‚unalienable’? And is it ‚right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called ‚natural human rights’ that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. „The third ‚right’? — the ‚pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition…
• Mr. Dubois then turned to me. „I told you that ‚juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‚Delinquent’ means ‚failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‚juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or…
• The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‚rights’ … and lost track of…
• We’ve got no place in this outfit for good losers. We want tough hombres who will go in there and win! •…
• The regiment had started with 2009 men; we graduated 187 — of the others, fourteen were dead (one executed and his name struck) and the rest resigned, dropped, transferred, medical discharge, etc. Major Malloy made a short speech, we each got a certificate, we passed in review for the last time, and the regiment was disbanded, its colors to be cased until they would be needed (three weeks later) to tell another couple of thousand civilians that they were an outfit, not a mob.
• The historians can’t seem to settle whether to call this one „The Third Space War“ (or the „Fourth“), or whether „The First Interstellar War“ fits it better. We just call it „The Bug War“ if we call it anything, which we usually don’t, and in any case the historians date the beginning of „war“ after the time I joined my first outfit and ship. Everything up to then and still later were „incidents,“ „patrols,“ or „police actions.“ However, you are just as dead if you buy a farm in an „incident“ as you are if you buy it in a declared war.
• This is silly, of course; you don’t win a war by defense but by attack—no „Department of Defense“ ever won a war; see the histories. But is seems to be a standard civilian reaction to scream for defensive tactics as soon as they do notice a war. They then want to run the war—like a passenger trying to grab the controls away from the pilot in an emergency.
• we spent the time to rendezvous strapped in our bunks, doped and unconscious, with the internal-gravity field of the Valley Forge off, to save power and give greater speed.
• I doubt if some of the smart second-guessers know all the facts.
• We didn’t have nova bombs at that time; we couldn’t crack Klendathu open.
• Even with Cherenkov drive, stars are far apart.
• In the past, armies have been known to fold up and quit because the men didn’t know what they were fighting for, or why, and therefore lacked the will to fight. But the M. I. does not have that weakness. Each one of us was a volunteer to begin with, each for some reason or other—some good, some bad. But now we fought because we were M. I. We were professionals, with esprit de corps.
• But don’t make the mistake of thinking that they acted purely from instinct, like termites or ants; their actions were as intelligent as ours (stupid races don’t build spaceships!) and were much better co ordinated. It takes a minimum of a year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting in with his mates; a Bug warrior is hatched able to do this.
• Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M. I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with „lessons from history“ is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
• But I can tell you what sort of a planet it is. Like Earth, but retarded.
• This bloke predicted that they would not do anything. He claims that the human race is too individualistic, too self-centered, to worry that much about future generations. He says that the genetic impoverishment of distant generations through lack of radiation is something most people are simply incapable of worrying about. And of course it is a far-distant threat; evolution works so slowly, even on Terra, that the development of a new species is a matter of many, many thousands of years.
• I could hear Colonel Dubois in my mind: „Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part … and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.“
• It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable … . He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor … . No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate. True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending … the ships themselves must be ruled under a system of absolute despotism. I trust that I have now made clear to you the tremendous responsibilities … . We must do the best we can with what we have. • John Paul Jones, September 14, 1775;
• I saw some of our friends, said good-by—she among them. She chattered away and said, ‚So you’re really going out? Well, if you reach Faraway, you really must look up my dear friends the Regatos.’ „ „I told her, as gently as I could, that it seemed unlikely, since the Arachnids had occupied Faraway. „It didn’t faze her in the least. She said, ‚Oh, that’s all right— they’re civilians!’
• I had at last found out what was wrong with me.“ He stopped, then said very softly, „I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal … but a man.“
• Yet somehow I don’t remember being unhappy. Too busy, I guess. There was never that psychological „hump“ to get over, the one everybody hits in Basic; there was simply the ever-present fear of flunking out.
• Well, why should I fight? Wasn’t it preposterous to expose my tender skin to the violence of unfriendly strangers? Especially as the pay at any rank was barely spending money, the hours terrible, and the working conditions worse? When I could be sitting at home while such matters were handled by thick-skulled characters who enjoyed such games? Particularly when the strangers against whom I fought never had done anything to me personally until I showed up and started kicking over their tea wagon— what sort of nonsense is this?
• We were reviewing events after the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony, 1987 and following. But this was the day that we heard the news of the destruction of San Francisco and the San Joaquin Valley; I thought he would give us a pep talk. After all, even a civilian ought to be able to figure it out now—the Bugs or us. Fight or die. Major Reid didn’t mention San Francisco. He had one of us apes summarize the negotiated treaty of New Delhi, discuss how it ignored prisoners of war … and, by implication, dropped the subject forever; the armistice became a stalemate and prisoners stayed where they were—on one side; on the other side they were turned loose and, during the Disorders, made their way home—or not if they didn’t want to.

  Kyle: Calling US vs China in the 1950s feels shocking. The Russia + US detail is interesting and then New Delhi as a middle ground? Very comparable to 2035 novel.

• Mr. Salomon, can you give me a reason—not historical nor theoretical but practical—why the franchise is today limited to discharged veterans?“
• In many cases civilians are much more intelligent. That was the sliver of justification underlying the attempted coup d’etat just before the Treaty of New Delhi, the so-called ‚Revolt of the Scientists’: let the intelligent elite run things and you’ll have utopia. It fell flat on its foolish face of course. Because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility.
• The practical reason for continuing our system is the same as the practical reason for continuing anything: It works satisfactorily.
• „Historic examples range from absolute monarch to utter anarch; mankind has tried thousands of ways and many more have been proposed, some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title The Republic. But the intent has always been moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government.
• Major Reid smiled cynically. „I have never been able to see how a thirtyyear old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year-old genius … but that was the age of the ‚divine right of the common man.’ Never mind, they paid for their folly.
• „Now here are we with still another system … and our system works quite well. Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb. Why? Not because our voters are smarter than other people; we’ve disposed of that argument.
• Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. „And that is the one practical difference.“ „He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.“
• Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives—such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will! — the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force.“
• If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble.“
• „Young man, can you restore my eyesight?“ „Sir? Why, no, sir!“ „You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue—social responsibility — into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is why we make it so hard to enroll, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination — devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues — which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. Conscript armies have been tried in the past.
• Briefly, thus: All wars arise from population pressure. (Yes, even the Crusades, though you have to dig into trade routes and birth rate and several other things to prove it.) Morals—all correct moral rules derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level—as in a father who dies to save his children. But since population pressure results from the process of surviving through others, then war, because it results from population pressure, derives from the same inherited instinct which produces all moral rules suitable for human beings.
• Without debating the usefulness or morality of planned parenthood, it may be verified by observation that any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out by breeds which expand. Some human populations did so, in Terran history, and other breeds moved in and engulfed them.
• Either we spread and wipe out the Bugs, or they spread and wipe us out — because both races are tough and smart and want the same real estate.
• Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics—you name it — is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is — not what do gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be. The universe will let us know—later — whether or not Man has any „right“ to expand through it.
• First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past—Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs didn’t even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men … and sometimes discovered too late that this smart young ‚officer’ was a fool, a poltroon, or a hysteric.
• The one thing—the only thing! — that can strike terror in the heart of a good platoon sergeant is to find that he’s working for a boss who can’t make up his mind.
• But I did not see him and he did not graduate. He was commissioned two weeks later and his pips came back with their eighteenth decoration—the Wounded Lion, posthumous.
• In a mixed ship, the last thing a trooper hears before a drop (maybe the last word he ever hears) is a woman’s voice, wishing him luck. If you don’t think this is important, you’ve probably resigned from the human race.
• But you can’t buy fighting spirit. It’s scarce. We use all of it, waste none. The M. I. is the smallest army in history for the size of the population it guards. You can’t buy an M. I., you can’t conscript him, you can’t coerce him—you can’t even keep him if he wants to leave. He can quit thirty seconds before a drop, lose his nerve and not get into his capsule, and all that happens is that he is paid off and can never vote.
• In place of that optimax of 5 per cent that the M. I. never can reach, many armies in the past commissioned 10 per cent of their number, or even 15 per cent — and sometimes a preposterous 20 per cent! This sounds like a fairy tale but it was a fact, especially during the XXth century. What kind of an army has more „officers“ than corporals? (And more non-coms than privates!) An army organized to lose wars — if history means anything. An army that is mostly organization, red tape, and overhead, most of whose „soldiers“ never fight.
• „Captain, I don’t see how I can get to bed by twenty-three— and still get everything done.“ „Then you won’t. As I said, son, you must have a sense of proportion. Tell me how you spend your time.“
• On our way home you can spend your time on math. If we get home. But you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t learn to keep first things first. Go to bed!“
• Poor arithmetic … but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.
• A private in a marauder suit can cover a lot of terrain, but he can look at only one thing at a time; he is not superhuman.
• if trouble broke there and those boys couldn’t be reached in time, the excuse that I had done it „by the book“ was worthless. If you get killed, or let some- body else get killed, „by the book“ it’s just as permanent as any other way.
• If a rocket fails to find its target, it has a nasty habit of continuing to search until it finds one … and it cannot tell friend from foe; a brain that can be stuffed into a small rocket is fairly stupid.
• staying alert means staying alive, so anything to avoid boredom.
• A suit is not a bed, but it will do. One good thing about hypno preparation for combat is that, in the unlikely event of a chance to rest, a man can be put to sleep instantly by post hypnotic command triggered by someone who is not a hypnotist—and awakened just as instantly, alert and ready to fight. It is a life-saver, because a man can get so exhausted In battle that he shoots at things that aren’t there and can’t see what he should be fighting.
• „Mr. Rico,“ he said slowly, „if the Captain knew he would tell us; I’ve never known him to hold back information. But sometimes he does things a certain way without being able to explain why. The Captain’s hunches — well, I’ve learned to respect them.“
• Anywhere else—the idea is to hunt Bugs.“ „Yes, sir.“ I agreed happily. „We hunt Bugs.“ „Johnnie!“ he said sharply. „If you go hunting medals instead of Bugs • and I find out — you’re going to have a mighty sad-looking Form Thirty-One!“ „Captain,“ I said earnestly, „I don’t ever want to win a medal. The idea is to hunt Bugs.“
• There are doctrines for how you should dispose a strike force underground — but what good are they? The only certainty was that the man who had written the doctrines had never himself tried them … because, before Operation Royalty, nobody had come back up to tell what had worked and what had not.
• Math is hard work and it occupies your mind—and it doesn’t hurt to learn all you can of it, no matter what rank you are; everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.
• I guess my „luck“ has usually been people—Angel
• Once his face was covered up, the shakes really hit me. My platoon sergeant put his arm around my armored shoulders. „Just like a drill, Son.“ „I know it, Father.“ I stopped shaking at once. „It’s the waiting, that’s all.“