Top 300 Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won’t shoot your foot off.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

2. “The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

3. “Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

4. “Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

5. “A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

6. “When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

7. “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

8. “My home is not a place, it is people.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

9. “Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

10. “I don’t want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

11. “I’ve got forward momentum. There’s no virtue in it. It’s just a balancing act. I don’t dare stop.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

12. “On the sixth day God saw He couldn’t do it all, so He created ENGINEERS.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

13. “Don’t wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you’re best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

14. “Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can’t trade for your heart’s desire is your heart.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

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

— Lois McMaster Bujold

16. “Experience suggests it doesn’t matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

17. “It’s an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

18. “I’m very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

19. “If you want to catch something, running after it isn’t always the best way.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

20. “If power was an illusion, wasn’t weakness necessarily one also?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

21. “If you’re trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it’s a lot easier to hit your targets if you don’t yell going through the door.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

22. “When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

23. “Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

24. “Too late, he recalled Miles’s dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

25. “Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

26. “I’ve always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

27. “The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

28. “If you can’t be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

29. “An honor is not diminished for being shared.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

30. “I will tell you, parenting is a team sport. You need backup, reserves.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

31. “It is always easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

32. “The meaning of yes is created by the ability to say no.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

33. “Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

34. “Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

35. “Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn’t going to supply it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

36. “When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

37. “I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

38. “If the truth doesn’t save us, what does that say about us?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

39. “You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

40. “Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

41. “Power is better than revenge. Power is a live thing, by which you reach out to grasp the future. Revenge is a dead thing, reaching out from the past to grasp you.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

42. “I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

43. “Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

44. “You may have slandered an honest man. Or you may have struck a blow for justice. I don’t know. The point is... neither do you.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

45. “Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

46. “The good face pain. But the great? They embrace it.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

47. “Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

48. “Adversity does teach who your real friends are.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

49. “A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

50. “A good friend of my son’s is a son to me.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold