H. Beam Piper/Quotes

""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 Atombomb, the dread destroyer, who would some day come to end the world. None were very good gods, and I worshipped none of them.""

- Calvin Morrison, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

"About the In-Universe trashy "historical novel" Dire Dawn by Hildegarde Hernandez:

Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-length picture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earrings and a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her affiliation with the class of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. ... [The author] "boasts that she never yet has been caught in an error of historical background detail. "The heroine is a sort of super-Mata-Hari, who is, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, in the pay of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Vatican, Chiang Kai-Shek, the Japanese Emperor, and the Jewish International Bankers, and she sleeps with everybody but Joe Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, and of course, she is in on every step of the A-bomb project. She even manages to stow away on the Enola Gay, with the help of a general she's spent fifty incandescent pages seducing." ... "We are now running a sort of gaseous-diffusion process, to separate the nuclear physics from the pornography. I must say, Hildegarde has her biological data very well in hand, too.""

- Uller Uprising

""Shatrak's face turned pink; the pink darkened to red. He used a word; it was a completely unprintable word. So, except for a few scattered pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions, were the next fifty words he used.""

- "A Slave Is a Slave," when a local honestly didn't know that suggesting Commodore Shatrak might be a slave was insulting