Space Cadet

The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy.

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.

She might get high enough to crash—no higher.

This school is based on the idea that a man who can think correctly will automatically behave morally—or

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.

Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all.” “Sir?” “I know, I know—you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

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.

They flew her,” Matt pointed out. “Sure they did—and my hat’s off to them. But it takes heroes to fly a box as primitive as this and I’m not the hero type.