# The Complete Paratime

- Author: [H. Beam Piper](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper.md)
- Quotes: 23
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime

## Quotes

> Alexandrian-Roman: off to a fine start with the pooling of Greek theory and Roman engineering talent, and then, a thousand years ago, two half-forgotten religions had been rummaged out of the dustbin and fanatics had begun massacring one another.

p. 250 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/alexandrian-roman-off-to-a-fine.md)

> Politics is nothing but common action to secure more favorable living conditions.

p. 81 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/politics-is-nothing.md)

> We define people as criminals when they suffer from psychological aberrations of an antisocial character, usually paranoid—excessive egoism, disregard for the rights of others, inability to recognize the social necessity for mutual cooperation and confidence.

p. 173 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/we-define-people.md)

> He had always suspected that beauty was the real feminine religion, from the willingness of its devotees to submit to martyrdom for it.

p. 178 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/he-had-always.md)

> Nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to himself.

p. 91 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/nobody-will-admit.md)

> Before the epidemic ended, it had almost de-populated this planet. Since the survivors knew nothing about germs, they blamed it on the anger of the gods—the old story of recourse to supernaturalism in the absence of a known explanation—and a fanatically anti-scientific cult got control.

p. 143 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/before-the-epidemic.md)

> 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. For instance, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, where I was just working, there is a political sect, the Communists, who, in the territory under their control, forbid the teaching of certain well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the world picture demanded by their political doctrines. And on the same sector, a religious sect recently tried, in some sections successfully, to outlaw of the teaching of evolution by natural selection.

p. 82 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/you-show-me-ten.md)

> There were dead infantry all along the road, mostly killed from behind. Another case of cowardice carrying its own penalty; infantry who stood against cavalry had a chance, often a good one, but infantry who turned tail and ran had none. He didn’t pity them a bit.

p. 350 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/there-were-dead.md)

> They are people who believe in only one god, and then they believe that the god they worship is the only true one, and all others are false, and finally they believe that the only true god must be worshiped in only one way, and that those who worship otherwise are vile monsters who should be killed.

p. 384 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/they-are-people.md)

> I’ve always wondered whether the theory of the divine right of kings was invented by the kings, to establish their authority over the people, or by the priests, to establish their authority over the kings. It works about as well one way as the other.

p. 245 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/ive-always-wondered.md)

> “What gods did your people worship?”
>
> “Oh, my people had many gods. There was Conformity, and Authority, and Expense Account, and Opinion. And there was Status, whose symbols were many, and who rode in the great chariot Cadillac, which was almost a god itself. And there was Atom-bomb, the dread destroyer, who would some day come to end the world. None were very good gods, and I worshiped none of them.

p. 278 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/what-gods-did.md)

> A planet could take pretty good care of itself, he thought, if people would only leave it alone.

p. 209 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/a-planet-could.md)

> “The standard smother-out technique,” Verkan Vall grinned. “I only heard a little talk about the ‘flying saucers,’ and all of that was in joke. In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it.”

p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/the-standard-smother-out.md)

> For each man the world ends when he dies.

p. 319 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/for-each-man.md)

> Very high on the I love Rylla, reasons why list was the fact that the girl had a brain and wasn’t afraid to use it.

p. 327 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/very-high-on-the.md)

> He’d seen theocracies all over paratime, and liked none of them; priests in political power usually made themselves insufferable, worse than any secular despotism.

p. 290 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/hed-seen-theocracies.md)

> “I wanted to know what sort of a madman—there are various kinds of madmen, all of whom must be handled differently—but all Hartenstein would tell me was that he had unrealistic beliefs about the state of affairs in Europe.”
>
> “Ha! What diplomat hasn’t?” I asked.

p. 27 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/i-wanted-to-know.md)

> Those people, because of deforestation, bad agricultural methods and general mismanagement, are eroding away their arable soil at an alarming rate. At the same time, they are breeding like rabbits. In other words, each successive generation has less and less food to divide among more and more people, and for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they refuse to adopt any rational program of birth-control and population-limitation.
>
> But, fortunately, they now have the atomic bomb, and they are developing radioactive poisons, weapons of mass-effect. And their racial, nationalistic and ideological conflicts are rapidly reaching the explosion point. A series of all-out atomic wars is just what that sector needs, to bring their population down to the world’s carrying capacity; in a century or so, the inventors of the atomic bomb will be held as the saviors of their species.

p. 125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/those-people-because.md)

> What does he think a religion is, on this sector, anyhow? Do you think these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity, up there, to express their yearning for higher things, or to symbolize their moral ethos, or as a philosophical escape-hatch from the dilemma of causation? They never even heard of such matters. On this sector, gods are strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of their worshipers, they get their sacrifice; when they can’t put out, they have to get out. How do you suppose these Chulduns, living in the Caucasus Mountains, got the idea of a god like a crocodile, anyhow? Why, they got it from Homran traders, people from down in the Nile Valley. They had a god, once, something basically like a billy goat, but he let them get licked in a couple of battles, so out he went.

p. 227 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/what-does-he-think.md)

> He listened to a series of angry recriminations and contradictory statements by different politicians, all of whom blamed the disorders on their opponents. The Volitionalists spoke of the Statisticalists as “insane criminals” and “underminers of social stability,” and the Statisticalists called the Volitionalists “reactionary criminals” and “enemies of social progress.” Politicians, he had observed, differed little in their vocabularies from one time-line to another.

p. 86 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/he-listened-to-a-series.md)

> Two were Assassins, and the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any time-line—the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well.

p. 95 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/two-were-assassins.md)

> A religious war, the vilest form an essentially vile business can take.

p. 385 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/a-religious-war.md)

> “Bad luck!” Brannad Klav snorted. “That’s the standing excuse of every incompetent!”

p. 225 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/h-beam-piper/the-complete-paratime/bad-luck-brannad.md)