Top 150 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Males do not form such groups – for who would have any use for a large group of males?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

102. “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

103. “He felt that familiar, baseline unhappiness of someone who would be judged entirely according to moral decisions made by others.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

104. “She asks them what they think those lights in the sky are: those below are astronomers enough to know that they are unthinkably distant fires. They are like your sun, she says. And around one such was a world much like your own, on which other eyes looked up at those distant lights, and wondered if anything looked back down.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

105. “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

106. “What was the use of a mad scientist if they suddenly decided to start making sane decisions?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

107. “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

108. “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

109. “Useless, surely. Might as well rely on thoughts and prayers.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

110. “That was the problem with associating with criminals. It led to Newtonian espionage. Each action produced an equal and opposite reaction and you couldn’t use without being used in turn.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

111. “The whole point of civilization is that we exceed the limits of nature, you tedious little primitives.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

113. “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

114. “New food. Different food. That had everyone’s interest. Across the span of the web, that was strung in mistlike sheets from tree to tree across their forest, he felt the others rousing, rising from their torpor. There was always food, even for so many bodies as Mother’s Brood ran to, but variety was welcome.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

116. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

118. “Ah, yes, hindsight, always my weapon of choice.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

119. “For that, I thank him. A vast and worthless education is the greatest gift a child can have.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “The whole audacious, ridiculous plan of his had worked out in every particular, save that he had failed to adjust for the destructive stupidity of the rest of humanity.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

124. “Sitting in that cell with him as he wheezed his last hours away, I could feel my presence eroding, the desert wind smoothing over all the footprints I had ever made.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

126. “I’m trying to keep track of all the ways this venture is likely to kill me but, yes, that’s one of them.’ She looked up at him without flinching. ‘Seriously, I am more concerned about that satellite. You need to cut us free right now. You need me isolating the ship’s systems so that thing can’t just walk in and take over.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

127. “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

128. “What’s the point of making better people, if they’re still sad and afraid and lonely?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

129. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

131. “He had bred them and mutated them and played all sorts of God, and now they wanted to know why and he had no answer.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

132. “Also, she’d been taught to think that the Parthenon were the right and the good. And rather than that meaning they got to do what they liked, and their actions would be whitewashed as right and good because of who they were, it meant they had to actually do right and good things.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

133. “Dictators don’t make the trains run on time, Rufus. They run down the rail networks because they travel in private planes.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

134. “Anyone wants out, then get out, no hard feelings. For I am in a mood to do some truly stupid things.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

135. “Oxygen was – to quote Mikhail Elesco, the team’s top geologist – a needy bastard that couldn’t stand not to be in a relationship, no matter how toxic.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

137. “Perhaps it was survival rather than victory, but sometimes just surviving was your definition of a win.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

138. “Like a bloody cave,” was Lief’s assessment, “and it stinks of magic.” Penthos gave him an arch look. “And you’d have a sensitivity for magic?” “It has floating lights, and that bloke over in the corner is wearing a crown of glowing ice, and his mate’s got the head of a parrot. I don’t think you need to be Grand Archmage Woddleflot to pick up the delicate scent of magic.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

139. “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

140. “One of the Academy Masters once said that nobody ever made a statue of a man running away. My answer to that is that very few living men get statues.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

142. “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

143. “She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species’ history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

144. “She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

145. “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

146. “It is easy for a comfortable, free man to cry at the fall of every little bird. A prisoner in fear of his life has precious little regret to spare for anyone else.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

147. “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

148. “But then blame is just credit for something that’s gone wrong.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

149. “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

150. “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