The Light Brigade Quotes

“This is something we don’t talk about . . . what happens when you are presented with a truth that contradicts everything you believe in? The widespread proliferation of information in the early days of the open knu, back when it was the wild net, should have made truth easier to find. But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs. Flood the world enough with information, and I will pick out only those bits that uphold the virtue and rightness of whatever corp I’ve been taught to love.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“People succumb to fear, no matter the government. The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into that fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“The power of the corrupt governments and entrenched corporations feels inevitable. No doubt so did the rule of kings and landowners before them.

But I know better now. I know there is a greater power, and it is ours. The greater power is us.

And that is the world we will build out here, somewhere, when we bring all our pieces back together.

A future made of light.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Don’t just fight the darkness, friends. Let’s be the light.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“I: You’re a communist then. S: Let’s say I’m old enough not to be dazzled by Ayn Rand.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“It takes a while to really get that it could happen to you. You’re the hero of your own story. The hero doesn’t die, can’t die, because then the story ends.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“They think they have chosen their servitude, and that makes them individuals, powerful. Freedom to work? Ha! Freedom to die on the factory floor, behind a desk, pissing in place because they don’t get bathroom breaks. Freedom to be fired at the whim of a boss bleeding you dry on stagnant wages you can only spend at the company store. But the choice of the whip or the chain is a false choice. Sometimes you have to leave people behind. They’re part of the old world. They aren’t capable of building something new. To build something new is to admit that the lives they lead aren’t what they believed. And to lose that belief . . . threatens their sense of themselves. The annihilation of beliefs is the annihilation of the self.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“It’s funny, how sometimes you run so hard away from something that you find yourself exactly where you started.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“That part of warcraft always appealed to me. Such things happen slowly . . . and then all at once. The ground must be carefully prepared, often for generations. Corporations had been chipping away at the authority of governments for a century before the Seed Wars. They experimented with company towns, and then outrageous benefits for employees. As health care became more expensive, one didn’t even have to offer private transport and free meals. Simply helping pay the cost to cure grandma’s cancer was enough to ensure blind obedience. That’s how you keep them loyal. Foster distrust in the democratic governments that are actually accountable to them.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Believing lies just makes everything . . . easier, when those lies prop up your worldview.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“The resistance here wants to unshackle you, but that’s too frightening for most people. So what does that leave us? Free people who believe they are already free? They think they have chosen their servitude, and that makes them individuals, powerful. Freedom to work? Ha! Freedom to die on the factory floor, behind a desk, pissing in place because they don’t get bathroom breaks. Freedom to be fired at the whim of a boss bleeding you dry on stagnant wages you can only spend at the company store.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Did you know those who are mildly depressed see the world more accurately? Yet they don’t live as long as optimists. Aren’t as successful. It turns out that being able to perceive actual reality has very little long-term benefit.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“The heroes were always the ordinary people who pursued extraordinary change. The power of the corrupt governments and entrenched corporations feels inevitable. No doubt so did the rule of the kings and landowners before them. But I know better now. I know there is a greater power, and it is ours. The greater power is us. And that is the world we will build out here, somewhere, when we bring all our pieces back together. A future made of light.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Imagine us all standing in a circle, trying to describe an object to one another, and as we agree on its characteristics, the thing at the center of our circle begins to take form. That’s how we create reality. We agree on its rules. Its shape.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“How old are you?"
"Who can say? I have been fighting this war a long time. Once you begin to drop, time becomes a luxury, an outdated thing, like the idea of voting or equality or freedom that meant anything but freedom for the rich from the burdens they force the poor to carry for them.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“And see what happened to America, after. It became everything it accused others of being. It tore itself apart, riddled by the rot of unfettered free speech, drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking. Liberal democracies and scheming socialist regimes were doomed from the start. You give a human being freedom and personhood as some innate right, and what do they have to fight for? Personhood is earned. Residency is earned. Citizenship is earned. If you’re not earning for the company, you are costing it”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“You’re the hero of your own story. The hero doesn’t die, can’t die, because then the story ends. But I’ve had a long time to sit with death, now. I have stared death in the face. I don’t like it much. I want to choose how this all ends. I don’t just want it taken from me. When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“How old are you?” “Who can say? I have been fighting this war a long time. Once you begin to drop, time becomes a luxury, an outdated thing, like the idea of voting or equality or freedom that meant anything but freedom for the rich from the burdens they force the poor to carry for them.” It was the most I’d ever heard her speak.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Whatever’s busted in your life—you can use its pieces to make the life you want.” —Warren Ellis”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“We’re all a bunch of guinea pigs. It’s why the corps love war.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“Only one percent of people are psychopaths. The rest of us have to learn.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“You have War of the Worlds?" I asked the knu. It returned twenty different films, sixteen editions of a text, but no radio play. Radio drama. That's the word Tanaka had used.
One text said it was history, and included a transcript. "Read it to me," I said, and the knu picked up the soothing default voice I had programmed into my heads-up, and told me a story about how little towns went crazy thinking the Martians were invading, back during the days of peak capitalism. What makes people believe this shit? I thought as I lay there listening. But it was easy, wasn't it, when people were isolated. When information was scarce or siloed. People would believe whatever you put in front of them, if it fit their understanding of the world. Bad Martians. Logical, well-meaning corporations.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want. The death that means the most to me. That is the good death, the best death, and that is the death I wish not only for myself, but for you, too. Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade