Weapons - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

The sole preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

- Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), translated by Walter James Miller (1978)

Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

- H. G.Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. [. . .] There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.

- George Bernard Shaw,Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (play, 1903)

No male or female Martian is ever voluntarily without a weapon of destruction.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)

The knife is the strongest, the most immortal, the most brilliant of man's creations. The knife has been a guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.

- A. E. van Vogt, ''The Seesaw'' (1941)

An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1942)

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1942)

There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.We're trying to teach you to be dangerous - to the enemy. Dangerous even without a knife. Deadly as long as you still have one hand or one foot and are still alive.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959)

Destroying civilization, always a task for fools, was relatively easy with the tools constructed for the purpose in the 20th century.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

He woke in sunlit morning, lying on his side, looking at the swords, cavalry sabres, hung crossed on the chimneypiece. They were tools, he thought, expressing purpose as simply as a needle or a hammer, their purpose, their reason or meaning, being death; they were made to kill men with; the slightly curved and still unpolished blades were death, were in fact his own death, which he saw with clarity and relaxation.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Two Delays on the Northern Line'' (1979)

The pen is mightier than the sword [. . .] only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.

- Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic (1986)

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game (1990)

A man with a gun is in no need of advice.

- Steve Aylett, Atom (2000)