Top 200 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “He felt that familiar, baseline unhappiness of someone who would be judged entirely according to moral decisions made by others.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

102. “You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

103. “Magic knows not light or darkness. It is the Power Elemental, that predates any such concerns,” he told her archly, somewhat sabotaged by the smug smirk that always crept onto his face when he was pontificating. “Besides, what need we fear the Dark, when we have you to show us the way to the Light?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

104. “I am overwhelmed by a terrible sadness, but it’s a good sadness in a way. It isn’t the leaden weight of my own self-pity and misery, the biochemical fallout of malfunctioning metabolism and cognition that just casts a dour filter over everything, whether there’s cause or not. I am sad for Lynesse Fourth Daughter, trying to be something that never existed in the world, and failing because it’s impossible, and trying again.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

105. “It is always at my back,” he continued, “and sometimes it grows bold and its teeth are at my throat. It drags me down, and if I did not carry a shield against it, I could not get up from beneath its weight.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

106. “In Holsten’s experience, a classicist’s dream was far more about letting someone else do the dangerous work, and then sitting back to write erudite analyses of the works of the ancients or, increasingly as his career had progressed, of other academics’ writings.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

109. “World peace, man. Forever and forever.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

110. “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

111. “An ancestress of hers stole the Sacred Eye of the Messenger from the ants, back when the ants were the great power in the world and not merely a convenient operating system to run Avrana Kern on.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

112. “Because the real problem with a knowledge-based economy is knowing that, no matter how hard you try, most of the information in the universe has already dissolved into entropy before you even evolved.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

113. “You want to fling yourself forwards past the badlands of the war, this is where you end up. And I’ll be waiting for you. Nobody gets by me.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

114. “We’re getting along platonically just exactly fine.” Meaning we spent all afternoon throwing things at Plato and it was hilarious.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

115. “The past is no man’s clay for remodelling. It is fired the moment it is moulded, alas. I.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

116. “I never wanted to have choices. Choices are hard. Choices can be wrong.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

117. “But there will come a time, even if it’s the heat death of the universe, when they will be gone. The living and the struggle is all. The moments of joy and sorrow, not just as stepping stones to the future, but taken on their own merits.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

118. “It is truly amazing how many flavors of dumb an apocalypse can spawn.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

119. “He suddenly understood the sentence of death that every one of God’s victims lived under.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

120. “The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

121. “Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

122. “To Havaer, as a professional agent, the thought of the paperwork alone filled him with dread.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

123. “Madness and sanity are judged by majority norms.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

124. “Lawful authority was all, and moral authority merely its shadow, to be forced into whatever shape the law adopted.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

125. “It was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

126. “I am only now, at the wrong end of three centuries after loss of contact, beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

127. “What they used to call non-neurotypical. Except, as we all went that way, it would eventually have to have been called typical. Because sometimes non-neurotypicality is what you need.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

128. “We have a situation down here.′ ‘Situations are also being had here,’ Kit told her.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

129. “The Greater Good morphed into self-interest so easily; human history was full of it.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

130. “Because we all know the past was horrible, and the only point of learning about or preserving the horrible horrible past is so we can know we’ve got it better now! That’s history! That’s education! That’s progress!”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

131. “He ended up hovering next to the doorway, realizing that some part of his mind had resigned itself to a future of dealing only with a few other humans, and had perhaps preferred that.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

132. “Yes, the universe was built on a certain common logic that could be expressed by numbers, but those numbers themselves were an arbitrary construct that was culturally specific.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

133. “You’re a learned man. Please tell me where the word ‘negotiate’ can be found within ‘unconditional surrender’.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

134. “Are you there, God, he replied. It is me, Uncharles.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

135. “The base unit of life is all life.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

136. “Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

137. “Males do not form such groups – for who would have any use for a large group of males?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

139. “Hesitant, broken sentences strung together by a cartilage of ellipses and question marks.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

140. “They want very specific answers from science. Black and white answers to complex questions. Everything sorted into predetermined boxes.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

141. “He also heard that other humans elsewhere had built robot soldiers, and the local humans had then had to build their own to avoid there being a robot soldier gap.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

142. “You think you’re imposing order by tightening the vice, cracking down, police on the streets, curfews and stop-and-search and let’s-see-your-ID. Except, you look at any place and time when that’s been instituted, you tell me whether history records those as havens of peace and stability. You show me when top-down imposition of order has done anything except fan the flames.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

143. “God is timeless but no god is greater than time.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

144. “Take away my machines and they would be at each other’s throats with swords and knives instead. Then take away their steel and they would pick up rocks and clubs. There is no saving them: they are merely the fuel for war’s engines. Only we, Totho – we are the point, the reason. We, because, alone amongst this destruction, we create, and we create so that they may destroy, so that we may create anew.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

145. “He felt as though he was the fallen tree in the forest, looking around with a “how about that, then?”expression, only to find that nobody had heard him.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

146. “He hadn’t ever been a courageous man, but desperation gave him wings.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

147. “It was not the demands on his physical frame that wore him down, but the way his mind seemed to be expanding to inhabit the entire wasteland, desperate to control and make safe a landscape that could be neither.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

148. “It was a terrible thing to know that, while he liked the department, he very much preferred them in their usual state of grim misery and personal problems. That made him sound like a profoundly broken person. Which he was, but not in that way. It was just that he wasn’t very good at being happy.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

149. “I mean the world is screwed, like we discussed, as evidence for which I present Exhibit A: the entire world.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

150. “God is better disposed towards those who feign the right humility.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky