Top 150 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Humanity is overrated.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

2. “Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

3. “I have a vision of tomorrow’s war, between people who have made themselves the slaves of entities that only exist in the heads of men, and people who want to be free. I hope I am wrong.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

4. “Doctor Avrana Kern awoke to a dozen complex feeds of information, none of which helped her restore her memories of what had just happened or why she was groggily returning to consciousness in a cold-sleep unit. She could not open her eyes; her entire body was cramping and there was nothing in her mental space except the overkill of information assailing her, every system of the Sentry Pod clamouring to report.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

5. “The sun filtered down through the waters like an embarrassment of sapphires.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

6. “That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

7. “Progress is made by the improvement of people, not the improvement of machines.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

8. “What does it mean that you are there and we are here? Is there meaning or is it random chance? Because what else does one ask even a broken cybernetic deity but, Why are we here?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

9. “Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

10. “Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

11. “Justice is like some unnatural hybrid flower you people have bred. It will not live long unless you keep it sheltered and warm.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

12. “This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

13. “Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire? To.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

14. “Surely every man’s courage was a rope of uncertain length, hauled hand over hand out of clouded waters. Who knew how suddenly that rope’s end would whip up into the air?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

15. “The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I’ve read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

16. “That is how people are. Once they have food and drink and shelter, the next thing they must find is a quarrel.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

17. “My name is Rex. I am a Good Dog.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

18. “The influx of new material from the abandoned station had slowed dramatically, every database and store having been raided and transferred over to the Gilgamesh.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

19. “I’ve never cared about religion, aside from as a subject of study in others, but in my blackest pits of despair I always find God and call out for help, because only an omnipotent outside force could possibly move the stone that is pressing me down. And God walks away, single footsteps off into the collective unconscious. He doesn’t care. Why should he? I wouldn’t.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

20. “A life lived entirely at the whim of another is no life at all.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

21. “If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

22. “There is an Old Earth phrase Kern used sometimes, about a boat whose every part was replaced, and was it the same boat then?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

23. “An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

24. “It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

25. “I wonder if his master is telling him Good Kitty every time he snaps his jaws shut or whether that does not matter for cats.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

26. “There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad. Perhaps it had: those on the ark ship could never know for sure. Holsten had his own beliefs, though, and they did not encompass salvation by any means other than the hand of mankind itself.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

27. “It’s easy, once the lamps are lit, to scoff at shadows.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

28. “Sometimes all it takes, to crack a problem, is a new perspective.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

29. “I don’t understand them. They don’t understand me. At the same time, we both understand each other.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

30. “They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

31. “Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

32. “The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

33. “The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

34. “She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

35. “I honestly think someone invented the time machine just so they could go grab a burger when the urge took them. Anyway, turns out saving the planet by eating soy was a bit of a non-starter given how we destroyed the entirety of history, but it was a good idea at the time.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

36. “It was defiance born of a lack of any hope.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

37. “Honour was like a coat: sometimes one did not have time to put it on.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

38. “There was a generation of wary caution on both sides, but once the nanovirus had taken down those barriers – between species and between individuals – so much potential tragedy was already averted. Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

39. “It was not such a long way to the weightlessness of the needle’s hollow interior. She had her choice then: either towards the engine core, where Sering had no doubt taken steps to ensure that he would not be disturbed; or away. Away, in a very final sense.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

40. “Because in five years, or ten, we’ll look back on all those creatures we killed, and we’ll know that we did a terrible thing just because the weathervane of popular opinion was spinning at the time.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

41. “I am changing hands so often, they should put customs duty on me.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

42. “The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

43. “Only one needs to find the answer, but difference is strength. To save everything, we need as much difference as possible.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

44. “She wants – or at least has constructed a hypothesis to which she is giving untoward weight – it to be something like her, or like she was. She is aware that she is stacking the deck of her own calculations to get the answer she wants. At the same time, it is the answer she wants, and so she agrees with herself to overlook her own fudging of the figures just this once.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

45. “And then it dropped lower, and her eyes caught it in all its pale majesty. It was a moth, no more, no less, but as it circled down towards them she saw that its furry body was larger than that of a horse, its wingspan awesome, each wing as long as six men laid end to end. It had a small head, eyes glittering amongst the glossy fur behind frond-like antennae that extended forward in delicate furls. As it landed, the sweep of its wings extinguished most of their little fires.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

46. “Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I’m sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

47. “I was also one of the pilots, although space piloting is one of those situations where they should really equip you with a dog, so your job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to bite you if you touch any of the expensive equipment.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

48. “The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

49. “It looks as though it got into God’s desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It’s in no hurry. It’s probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

50. “Most conspiracies, after all, seem weird on the surface but are really an attempt to drag things down to a human scale: a flat Earth instead of the immensity of the cosmos, shadowy illuminati instead of a chaotic mess of chance, incompetence and greed.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky