Top 200 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “The vengeance of the Razor and the Hook shall not be circumscribed in time and space. When moment comes to lay waste to its foe th’Unspeakable shall never stay its hand.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

152. “The glorious binary notation, blessed with a universality beyond any other code of record. The absolutely knowable and polarised ideaspace, where a thing is either there or not, either the light of a one, or the darkness of a zero. A divine perfection, the point where the outstretched fingers of human and robot may finally touch.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

154. “You ever think about the fundamental paradox of our society? How they build a tight-knit machine of a state by breaking everyone down into solitary units turned against each other? How you compel mass obedience out of the most individualistic drives of selfishness, greed and fear?”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

155. “It is a great lie of civilisation that the things we invest with our emotions are real and important, but they are not. Take away the people and they vanish into smoke. All those idle dreams: government, money, education, love, revenge. All these things are parasites that cannot survive without the host.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

156. “A Palleseen writer once described the world of superstition and unreason that they were bringing perfection to as ‘the Great Night’, contrasted with the clarity of their rational sun. Which writer was subsequently excised from the Pal canon because personification of an abstract is in itself irrational. Nonetheless, the night persists.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

157. “None of these things are efficient or logical. I wish to report an error in the way that everything works.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

158. “You look at the death they sentenced you to, and squint until you can pretend it’s living.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

159. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

161. “He was, he considered, very employable. He was used to providing very high levels of service coupled with a very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

163. “Space was, as the saying went, very big.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

164. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

167. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

187. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

192. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

194. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

196. “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

197. “She found the smile she kept for him, and just for him.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

198. “Change is a bastard, as any disnosaur will tell you.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

199. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky