“So why do you hate us? If you don’t mind my asking.” “You personally? I don’t. But this conquistador… — James S. A. Corey
“So why do you hate us? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“You personally? I don’t. But this conquistador bullshit? It’s true I don’t think much of it.”
Singh leaned back in his chair, cocked his head. “This is all a conversation about politics for you, then? It matters to you that much whose vision guides the government, no matter what that vision is?”
“Not that academic,” Holden said. “I’ve spent a lot of years trying to get people to get along without anyone’s boot being on anyone’s neck. Your plan A is what I’ve spent a lifetime pushing against.”
“Do you really think we’re so bad? Look at what we’ve done, how we’ve done it. We haven’t opened fire on a single ship that didn’t attack us first. In all of history, when has a conqueror been able to say that? We have embraced local rule. Any of the colony worlds that submits can make their own local government, keep their own local customs—”
“Unless they conflict with your rules.”
“Of course.”
Holden sipped his coffee. “That’s the thing. The people you’re controlling don’t have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone’s on the same page, things may be great, but when there’s a question, you win. Right?”
“There has to be a way to come to a final decision.”
“No, there doesn’t. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.”
p. 393Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
“You’re not picking a fight with the things that made the protomolecule. You’re picking a fight with whatever killed them. Orders of magnitude above the things that were orders of magnitude above us. You’ve got to know this is going to escalate if we keep using these technologies.”
“We were always going to keep using these technologies. That was inevitable the moment we opened the gates,” Duarte said. “If you’ve studied any history at all, you know that. Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.”
p. 548
The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten.
p. 532
He lifted the gun.
“Wait!” Singh said. “Wait. Do you believe all that? About what killing me is supposed to achieve?”
“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”
p. 520
