Top 50 Ada Palmer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This world is far from perfect, but people have never been happier, healthier, more productive, more free, more equal. We have a lot of improvements still to make, but we’ve come a long way compared to any older era.”

— Ada Palmer

2. “There has to be an Outsider or the next strangest will be named Outsider.”

— Ada Palmer

3. “Celibacy is the most extreme of sexual perversions, after all.”

— Ada Palmer

4. “One straying angel won’t make God tremble.”

— Ada Palmer

5. “It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.”

— Ada Palmer

6. “Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.”

— Ada Palmer

7. “What we choose means more than what is handed to us by chance.”

— Ada Palmer

8. “I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.”

— Ada Palmer

9. “I told you before how hard I fight to make myself believe in this drifting dream you call the present. Now I lost that fight.”

— Ada Palmer

10. “If history is written by winners, fiction like that is written by bystanders trying to guess what the victims would have said if they’d survived.”

— Ada Palmer

11. “Legend says that Emperor Constantine, converted on his deathbed, willed the Roman Empire to the Christian Church, and in one act both ensured that Church’s immortality and doomed Europe to nineteen centuries of wars for God;.”

— Ada Palmer

12. “The more people insist that feminism has won, the more they blind themselves to its remaining foes.”

— Ada Palmer

13. “Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?”

— Ada Palmer

14. “Ah, reader, I understand it is your kindness which fills you with this hubris, but it is hubris still. You presume, not only to advise your Maker, but to demand that He respond to your advice by revising the infinite and perfect Plan of His Creation precisely as you – with your flawed and finite wisdom – recommend?”

— Ada Palmer

15. “As Machiavelli observed, Rome showed, tyrant after tyrant, how those reared in palatine luxury, expecting to be master of the world, basely abused the godlike authority that fell to them unearned, while those promoted through merit – Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius – made judicious use of the Imperium of which they considered themselves, not owners, but custodians. It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours.”

— Ada Palmer

16. “No nation, whatever its power, can be called great when it imposes tyranny upon its citizens – worse, upon people it claims as its citizens, not.”

— Ada Palmer

17. “Histories say scared Majorities hurt Minorities. That’s why you hide. Utopia pretends ut because they’re openly giving Implants to U-beasts they aren’t secretly giving them to humans too, and you pretend ut because you don’t make Set-Sets anymore you aren’t making other, stranger Things. They make U-Beast Jokes to make Others forget Mars will be real; you make Number Puzzles to make Others forget your Machine-Brain-Copy will be real too.”

— Ada Palmer

18. “I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.”

— Ada Palmer

19. “Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal.”

— Ada Palmer

20. “Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.”

— Ada Palmer

21. “Have you never watched a death, reader? In slow cases like blood loss it is not so much a moment as a stretch of ambiguity – one breath leaves and you wait uncertain for the next: was that the last? One more? Two more? A.”

— Ada Palmer

22. “Never create a personal enemy. Always keep layers of minions between yourself and someone you destroy, it’s safer that way.”

— Ada Palmer

23. “A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.”

— Ada Palmer

24. “No one comes to stone the servant when they could watch the execution of the king.”

— Ada Palmer

25. “Apollo thought that we need suffering to create people capable of enduring suffering. World Peace does not breed heroes.”

— Ada Palmer

26. “Mr. Smith is a banker, Mrs. Christian is a nurse, as if those twenty or forty or sixty hours made the other hundred of each week nothing. How do you introduce yourself at parties, reader? Are you a cook? A hiker? A reader? A moviegoer?”

— Ada Palmer

27. “Nothing under Providence is ever certain until an agent goes and tries and makes it so.”

— Ada Palmer

28. “Color-coded rank hats? Those are worse than wearing a bull’s-eye on your chest! If you want your commanders to survive a week, you want no difference in uniform visible from more than a few meters away. Marking them out like this is madness!”

— Ada Palmer

29. “Predators need the right to tear out each other’s throats.”

— Ada Palmer

30. “Truth is water in a sieve. It’s not enough to put your hand across the holes and hope.”

— Ada Palmer

31. “Perhaps your better age is finally past it, reader, but my society – despite our neuter efforts – still shoves gender down our throats, imbibed in toddlerhood when a child whom the adults label ‘girl’ gets chided just a little more for getting her nice clothes muddy than a child we see as ‘boy’ and associate with snails and muddy puppy tails.”

— Ada Palmer

32. “Golden Ages always end with Dark ones.”

— Ada Palmer

33. “In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales.”

— Ada Palmer

34. “Such mercy!” Hobbes too marvels, “to say that thought without deed is not a crime! In my day almost as many were executed for opinion as for deed, and even to imagine the king’s death constituted treason.”

— Ada Palmer

35. “We all imagine happy endings to such books, pick out the page, the paragraph, in which we would step in and pluck the innocents to safety.”

— Ada Palmer

36. “Now, though, the command he gave made two vaguenesses congeal into one threat, distant, amorphous, but unmistakable, as when, against a background of city dawn and back alley clatter, one click and one clack come together into the telltale click-clack of a ready gun, and echo won’t tell you whether the enemy’s perch is left, or right, or high, or low, only that it is near.”

— Ada Palmer

37. “Imagine, reader, in primordial days some vicious dinosaur, heavy with nightmare jaws, which chases a shimmering lizard up a slope, and the predator rejoices, already tasting the kill in its blood-starved mind, when, all at once, its slim prey spreads its feathered fins and takes to the air in a world that had not yet realized life could fly. You.”

— Ada Palmer

38. “I am nowhere near understanding Time. It seems to be a direction in which sentience can only move one way and perceive the other, but it also destroys, and twists, and swallows, making legacies differ from, or even oppose, intent. It annihilates, repeats, erases. It is too alien to me.”

— Ada Palmer

39. “Books, even made-up stories, can’t all have happy endings because they reflect the real world, and the real world isn’t always happy.”

— Ada Palmer

40. “More than sixty years ago we instituted floating citizenship, so children of mixed parents would not be compelled to choose between several equal fatherlands. It was not the end of our countries. Almost everyone still prefers to have a homeland to love and return to, and the legal possibility of life without a homeland does not destroy the bonds of culture, language, and history which make a homeland home.”

— Ada Palmer

41. “I trust my doctor with my life, but not my dirty laundry.”

— Ada Palmer

42. “I think all human beings, even I who have no right to ask more of the world, wish to see the future. I don’t mean the whole future; after a millennium history must progress beyond one’s ability to understand.”

— Ada Palmer

43. “Heartless reality does not grant humans the lifespan necessary to master every specialty of science, so no one genius in his secret lab can really bring robots, mutants, and clones into the world at his mad whim – it takes a team, masses of funds, and decades. But one man can love all sciences, even if he cannot wield them, and he can inspire children with the model of the mad genius, even if he cannot live it.”

— Ada Palmer

44. “Since ancient days there has been a name for Senatorial recommendations that carry the force, not of law, but of the Will of the Leviathan, but the name is Latin, and we cannot say Senatus Consultum without implying that the Latin-speaking Masons somehow own this, much as we half believe they own all Romanova, built for us by MASONS past. So we instead say ‘Senatorial Consult,’ which translates to ‘Let’s pretend we aren’t thinking about Masons right now.’ Of course we are.”

— Ada Palmer

45. “Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning.”

— Ada Palmer

46. “Our modern moths have bounced so many times off lightbulbs, they aren’t prepared for torches, and forget that wings can burn.”

— Ada Palmer

47. “Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once?”

— Ada Palmer

48. “What I have read of war suggests that the most devastating mistakes are often made either in war’s inception, when the front lines take their shapes, or after the surrender. In the latter case, exaltation and vendetta often have clouded victors’ judgments as they laid the architecture of their postwar worlds.”

— Ada Palmer

49. “It was an intense embrace, no awkwardness, no holding back, the kind of hug two people can only achieve after long intimacy, but anyone can give in an instant to a stuffed bear.”

— Ada Palmer

50. “Every day you step into my life, you make it brighter, and if you left the world, something in me would starve for you forever, as when some barrier rises to shade a plant, which still has light enough to grow some but will never again taste the unbroken sun.”

— Ada Palmer