HAD to Be Sharp/Quotes

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

—Marcus Aurelius

Kohr-Ah: We evolved on a hostile world, the descendants of solitary hunters.
Kohr-Ah: In a world where one species is the dominant killer
Kohr-Ah: one's only threat is one's brother, one's sister, anyone of one's species.
Kohr-Ah: Civilization did not come easily to us, we earned it.
Kohr-Ah: We mastered our hatreds and murderous desires to form a mighty culture.
Kohr-Ah: In those ancient days, there was no Kohr-Ah or Kzer-Za, only the Ur-Quan.
Kohr-Ah: We explored our world, and then the space beyond.
Kohr-Ah: Here we met the six races of the Sentient Milieu
Kohr-Ah: here we met the Taalo... the only species we ever called `friend'.
Kohr-Ah: Our association with the Taalo and the Milieu lasted for three thousand years.
Kohr-Ah: We, the Ur-Quan who could not tolerate the presence of others
Kohr-Ah: became the Milieu's scouts, their solitary explorers.
Captain: Who were the Taalo?
Kohr-Ah: Of all the species we have met, only the Taalo did not trigger our instinctive territoriality.
Kohr-Ah: They were the only people we could stand with, or talk to, without the hunter inside us screaming
Kohr-Ah: `Kill the interloper! Rip out its life!'

— Star Control II

The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.
But we,—we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources,—have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods,—techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any vital scientific advance.

—Mallow, Foundation