Top 60 David Weber Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world’s best swordsman doesn’t fear the second best; he fears the worst swordsman, because he can’t predict what the idiot will do.”

— David Weber

2. “My duty is not affected by what others may or may not do to discharge their own.”

— David Weber

3. “Never keep a lawyer waiting. They have friends in low and infernal places.”

— David Weber

4. “Giving orders you know won’t be obeyed is one of the best ways I know to destroy your own authority.”

— David Weber

5. “Fail not in this charge at your peril.”

— David Weber

6. “All men begin as good men. What they are taught as children, what is expected of them as young men, is either the armor about that goodness or the flaw that allows evil in.”

— David Weber

7. “It was rumored she held grudges till they died of old age, then had them stuffed and mounted.”

— David Weber

8. “Shut not your minds to the new because the chains of the past bind you tight, for it is those who cling most desperately to the old who will turn you from the new way and lead you once more in to the paths of the unclean.”

— David Weber

9. “It had to be the greatest irony in the history of mankind, he thought. The last Christian in the entire universe was a machine.”

— David Weber

10. “The bigger the lie, apparently, the more likely the uninformed were to accept it, simply because they couldn’t believe any government would tell such an absurd story unless it were true.”

— David Weber

11. “Vegtables, what food eats before it becomes food.”

— David Weber

12. “God, I love the “fine morality” of the wealthy and powerful. You’ll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.”

— David Weber

13. “Yet i say to you, do not rush to marriage for it is a deep and perfect thing. Test first, that you may be certain you are called to it by love, and not simply by pleasures of the flesh which will consume themselves and leave only ashes and misery.”

— David Weber

14. “Spies could be invaluable in peacetime, once the fighting actually started, their value dropped steeply. When the swords were out, it was the information your own scouts provided that mattered, not reports from unknown people whose veracity you couldn’t prove.”

— David Weber

15. “I want manned spaceflight, not just back to the Moon, but beyond that. And I want my daughters and my son to have their own July 20, 1969, to remember. Apollo 11 didn’t give us wings; it only showed us how far the wings we had would take us.”

— David Weber

16. “I think it’s like that for people who don’t remember 1969 first-hand. It’s that sense of ‘old hat.’ Of ‘been there, done that.’ Space shuttles, space stations, communications satellites, GPS – they’re all part of our everyday, taken-for-granted world in 2009, not part of an incredible odyssey.”

— David Weber

17. “Son, you’ll know you’re in love when a woman’s voice settles into your spine.”

— David Weber

18. “It must come from your father’s side of the family,” Allison informed her with severe disapproval. “You never got that sort of dreary, plebeian logic from my genes, dear! Beowulfans’ cognitive processes rely far more on the creative and intuitive manipulation of concepts without the drudgery of applying reason to them. Don’t you realize how badly you can damage a perfectly good preconception or assumption if you insist on thinking about it that way? That’s why I never indulge in such a vice.”

— David Weber

19. “And if I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that when it comes down to raw emotion against reason, emotion wins.”

— David Weber

20. “If you ever mention my uncle to me again, I will personally push your face through the top of this table,” Elizabeth told him in a flat, deadly tone, and the baron recoiled physically from her.”

— David Weber

21. “Henke sensed her terrifying aptitude for destruction as never before. Henke had feared for her sanity; now she knew the truth was almost worse than that. Honor wasn’t insane – she simply didn’t care. She’d lost not only her sense of balance but any desire to regain it.”

— David Weber

22. “She didn’t know a lot about politics – yet – but she’d learned enough in her history classes to know politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.”

— David Weber

23. “But every time I told myself one lie, I had to tell another to justify the ones that came before it.”

— David Weber

24. “That thought let her banish the grin at last, because if independent command was what every good officer craved, a captain all alone in the big dark had no one to appeal to. No one to take the credit or share the blame, for she was all alone, the final arbiter of her ship’s fate and the direct, personal representative of her queen and kingdom, and if she failed that trust no power in the galaxy could save her.”

— David Weber

25. “All right, Chief Killian.” She allowed herself an airy gesture at the forward visual display. “That away – full military power.”

— David Weber

26. “I am an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, Sir – ” Venizelos felt an undeniable rush of adrenaline and pleasure as he faced the burly captain squarely “ – and the Royal Manticoran Navy does not ’bluff.”

— David Weber

27. “The list went on and on, and there’d been a time when she’d craved those medals, those confirmations of achievement and ability. She was proud of them even now, but they were no longer the stuff of dreams. She’d learned too much about what those bits of ribbon cost.”

— David Weber

28. “Mother’s casting hungry looks at my exec again,” she complained. “Not to worry,” her father replied. “She looks a lot, but she’s never had any reason to roam.” “You’re as bad as she is!”

— David Weber

29. “She was thirteen T-years older than he, but there was something uncannily familiar about his emotions where she was concerned. Somehow, without realizing it was happening, she’d acquired a MacGuiness with a gun, and she suspected her life would never be quite the same again. She.”

— David Weber

30. “The marvelous intricacy of the rules they’d established, the processes they’d set into motion, the miracles of subtlety and beauty, were enough to make anyone drunk with admiration and awe, and how could God, having given man the ability to reason and understand, not want him to explore all the beautiful marvels with which He’d surrounded him? She.”

— David Weber

31. “You’re entitled to not be strong about everything every instant. And you have the right to admit that it hurts, and that things frighten you.”

— David Weber

32. “Whatever it took, she would discharge her own duties and meet her own responsibilities. Not just to protect her career, but because they were her duties and responsibilities.”

— David Weber

33. “Victor smiled politely in return, the way someone smiles when they’re thanked for having done a minor favor in times past. Held open a door in the rain, lent someone a small amount of money, butchered an ex-lover, that sort of thing.”

— David Weber

34. “She was never certain how long she wept, and it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t something to be measured by clocks, cut up into minutes and seconds.”

— David Weber

35. “The wise monarch listens to his generals in matters of war, to his ministers in matters of state, and to his people in matters of morality.” “Ha!”

— David Weber

36. “They could hate her guts all they liked as long as they did their duty.”

— David Weber

37. “Nuts didn’t need religion to make them nuts, Allison had long since decided, but it did seem to give them a certain added sense of commitment to whatever goals their nutdom decided to embrace.”

— David Weber

38. “And for the whole system to be healthy, all parts of it must enjoy equal freedoms. And the most fundamental of all those freedoms is this: that persons must be free to read, write, say, and think what they will. Without that, all other freedoms are not merely meaningless, they are shams.”

— David Weber

39. “She’d headed the terraforming teams, and it was her leadership which had carried the task through to success. She and her people, watched over by Kau-yung’s flagship, TFNS Gulliver, had battled the planet into submission while most of the colony fleet had waited, motionless, holding station in the depths of interstellar space, light-years from the nearest star.”

— David Weber

40. “If one of her officers needed reprimanding, she would attend to it in private, just as she made it a point to deliver praise in public.”

— David Weber

41. “So bring on your inquiry. Present your case, and we’ll present ours. Not because we give one single solitary damn for your prepackaged, predetermined ‘impartial conclusions,’ but because we care about history. Because unlike you, we do care about truth. And because someday your successors, whoever they may be, will have a record of what you actually do here and will revile your memory with all the contempt and all the disdain your actions will so richly merit.”

— David Weber

42. “Lester Tourville stared at his plot in horror as the impeller signatures of sixty-eight Republican ships of the wall abruptly vanished. Seventeen continued to burn on the display for another handful of seconds. Then they, too, vanished in what he devoutly hoped was a frantic hyper translation.”

— David Weber

43. “We heads of state really prefer to have some sort of an agenda before we sit down at the high-stakes table, you know. All bad novelists notwithstanding, surprise and improvisation are not the best basis for successful diplomacy!”

— David Weber

44. “Battles aren’t always – or even usually – won by killing everybody on the other side. They’re won inside the other side’s brains and wills. Given the right weapons, the right tactical situation, anyone can kill an enemy. Convincing her to yield, to do what you set out to compel her to do without killing her – that’s harder.”

— David Weber

45. “It was only in stupid stories written by idiots that good triumphed unscathed and only the evil died. She’d known that, but where did it say her people must always be the ones to pay for victory? Her.”

— David Weber

46. “Courtesy seldom costs anything, and the willingness to extend it can be its own subtle declaration of strength. There.”

— David Weber

47. “There’s not much point in making logical arguments to someone who’s already decided to ignore inconvenient truths, so.”

— David Weber

48. “The message she’d just ordered Webster to send and Venizelos to relay to Manticore was never sent in drills, not even in the most intense or realistic Fleet maneuvers. Case Zulu had one meaning, and one only: “Invasion Imminent.”

— David Weber

49. “He seemed quite a cheerful fellow, too. Even puckish, you might say – at least if, like Brice, you had just recently encountered the term and been taken by it, but hadn’t yet read enough literature to realize that “puckish” was by no means the same thing as “harmless.”

— David Weber

50. “There’s got to be at least some contact if they aren’t going to lose their assets simply because someone dies before she gets around to telling her son or daughter “Oh, by the way. We’re actually secret agents for the Mesan Alignment. Here’s your secret decoder kit. Be ready to be contacted by the Galactic Evil Overlord on Frequency X with orders to betray the society you’ve been raised all your life to think of as your own.”

— David Weber