Top 150 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

52. “Negotiations with the locals have gone sufficiently well –now that Portia and her party have established their superiority –and the incumbents have lent the three travellers a male to serve as a guide in the lands to the north.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

53. “We do not respect our enemies; we despair of them. Your struggle, your fierce will to prevail in spite of all, we do not admire this. We see only a terrible, senseless waste of life – both ours and yours. We see murdered potential, young men and women who might have become anything becoming only corpses through one woman’s dreams of conquering a city she has not even seen.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

54. “Are they wondering if Lain and I will save them by being here? Because, if so, they weren’t listening to Guyen closely enough before.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

55. “Damn you!” he yelled at the ceiling, because, even though he’d come from above and knew nothing was up there, that was still the direction that the powers of Earth resided, whether gods or just rich people in spaceships.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

56. “The ice had been retreating. Humanity had sprung back swiftly, expanded, fought its small wars, re-industrialized, tripping constantly over reminders of what the species had previously achieved.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

57. “Her attention had drifted a little and, by the time she realized what he had said, the words had passed on to the crew. She registered suddenly a murmur of concerned messages between them, and even simple spoken words whispered between those closest to her. Doctor Mercian meanwhile sent her an alert on another channel: ‘Why is Sering in the engine core?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

58. “He tested his fragile composure and found that it would take his weight.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

59. “Bees’ channel: Killing humans is what we are for. Dragon’s channel: Killing humans is even what humans are for.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

60. “Hartnell had no idea what Murray would be doing with his life if he wasn’t ordering animals to kill people in the name of a shadowy junta of ousted special interests. Probably something in investment banking or venture capitalism, any trade where an utter inability to empathise with the people he hurt was considered a positive boon.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

61. “We’re here and they trust us.’ Mal chuckled. ‘It’s a million-to-one long shot, and only these two desperate lesbians can save the world. Perfect action movie material.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

62. “Do you remember, all those years ago, when you would talk and talk, and I would say nothing at all? How we have changed.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

63. “Helping people is like beating your head against a wall, and in the end, when you live forever and you’re sick of the same mistakes over and over and over; in the end the only thing left is just to amuse yourself at their expense. Because you can’t make things better, and frankly, no matter how much evil you do, you’re not making things much worse, either.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

64. “Sometimes it is hard because we have to make choices. I remember when having to make choices scared me more than anything else except Master being angry with me. Now I know that making choices is the price of being free.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

65. “The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

66. “Shadrapar has no purpose, no function. It exists for itself only, its own downward spiral to oblivion. It exists only to imprison the minds of those who dwell within it, so that their world shrinks until it holds nothing but their own desires, and they fight to stop you showing what’s beyond the bars. So I called it the cage of souls, so they would understand.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

67. “He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They have come so far, as a species; they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

68. “In her speech, which she was barely paying attention to, she meandered down a list of other names, from here or at home. The person she really wanted to thank was herself. She had fought for this, her engineered longevity allowing her to carry the debate across several natural human lifetimes. She had clashed in the financiers’ rooms and in the laboratories, at academic symposiums and on mass entertainment feeds just to make this happen.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

69. “I am the full stop to the sentence that is human history.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

70. “Change hurts, but it hurts most those who shackle themselves to the past.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

71. “This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to. For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

72. “Being free means the responsibility to make the right choice.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

73. “We are here because we are dangerous. I do not understand: they made us to be dangerous. I do not see how they can be surprised when we were.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

74. “Do I say ‘This is where it starts?’ There’s nowhere where it starts. Life is constant creation, change and destruction. The trick is knowing one from the other.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

75. “Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

76. “She’s learning that getting a proper education doesn’t answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

77. “Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

78. “Complex life was merely the recent froth over a great vat of prokaryotes feeding and dividing and dying.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

79. “We’re going on an adventure.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

80. “Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

81. “Olian Timo was harder to get rid of than a venereal disease working for the Hugh tax office.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

82. “It’s a fine line, I suspect, between useful logic and that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

83. “For I am change. I am the flag of the future and the scourge of the past. The old order is the phoenix egg I am born from, but to fly I may have to burn them, or they will clip my wings.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

84. “These feelings are just recruiting allies of convenience from my rational mind, like a mob lifting up a momentary demagogue who may be discarded a moment later in favour of a better. Even in the grip of my feelings I can still acknowledge all this, and it doesn’t help. Know thyself, the wise man wrote, and yet I know myself, none better, and the knowledge gives me no power.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

85. “I want to try something a bit lateral,’ Holsten explained. ‘Is it likely to get us blown up ahead of schedule?’ ‘I don’t think so.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

86. “Kittering looked up from the display. ‘I am mistaken as a spokesman for an entire species. Very non-cosmopolitan.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

87. “Empathy is the cornerstone of what her composite people have made together.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

88. “The conspiracy theorist’s dream, the cabal of the mighty getting together to obliterate the bulk of humanity just so they could be kings of what remained.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

89. “You are made of My will, and you are made of the technology of that other world, but all of this has been to speed you on a path you might have taken without me, given time and opportunity. You are Mine, but you also belong to the universe, and your purpose is whatever you choose. Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

90. “Knowledge. New, shiny things. Better thinkers than we have observed that, when you reach this level of post-scarcity civilization, it’s either wallow in your own excesses forever or seek out newness. Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

91. “The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

92. “And he was a false prophet if anyone was. He was the debased currency of patriotism.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

93. “Telling people to go to hell in such a way that they enjoy the trip,” the Hiver supplied. “It’s been a privilege having you on the diplomatic staff.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

94. “What can be so urgent? Some of the crew always think of war, when it comes down to this, but what war? What is there to fight over, in a universe that is bigger than even we can ever exhaust, with more of anything than we could ever need?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

95. “How much worse to think yourself wise, and still be as ignorant as one who knew themselves a fool?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

96. “I could do such things, what they are I yet know not, but they would be the terror of the Earth.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

97. “Nobody wanted to think about the limited range of fates possible for such a speck of human dust in the vast face of the cosmos.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

98. “He could be human, in that last moment. He could exalt in his ability to destroy.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

99. “The secret of gunpowder is that anyone – a man, a woman, a child, a cripple – can kill with it.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

100. “They’re not plundering a tomb, they’re robbing a corpse, and the difference between those two things is scale and longevity.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky