Top 200 Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

154. “His previous triangulation data informed him that they were come nigh unto the Kingdom of Heaven. Which Nietzschean compass indicated that God was dead ahead.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

158. “Aklu’s doing a thing.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

160. “In his own mind, Senkovi was known for his sense of humour, an organ that in truth amused only himself.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

161. “Intelligent aliens might introduce a level of moral complexity that would compromise operational efficiency. Cynical of me to think about it in that way, I know, but there was always a good commercial use-case for minimizing the potential rights of whoever’s environment you were destroying.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

162. “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

163. “We know the drudgery of being surrounded by all that unceasing banality.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

164. “There’s a thing on Earth, a marine isopod, that eats the tongues of fish and then replaces them so it can keep on stealing the fish’s food. But to do so, it has to be a fish tongue as its second job. It’s good enough at it that the fish goes on living, and maybe, because the new independent tongue has a load of little scrabbly arms, it’s actually better than the old one.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

165. “So who the hell is it who gets to name God? Or did it name itself? Wait, is this the computer that they built to say whether there’s a God or not and when they turn it on it tells them that now there is? Because, great idea for a story, sure, but history is full of people saying they’re God, and in retrospect they were all liars.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

166. “The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

167. “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

168. “A dagger of ambition in the sheath of a generous uncle with a pocket full of sweets.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

169. “Being in its presence was weirdly fatiguing for Uncharles. He had never encountered another robot with so many undirected tics and mannerisms. Processing them was a serious drain on his system resources.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

170. “You do not get to empty my purse just because you parrot a word and think yourself wise.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

171. “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

172. “They were part of the problem, even though they never actively did bad things to people. They just benefited from all the bad things that had been done.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

174. “This too shall pass: simultaneously the best and worst commentary on any moment of human experience.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

175. “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

176. “No questions, because to pry into the reasons and the logic of it would be to pull the miraculous apart and find, no doubt, the mundane and the reasonable behind it.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

177. “In the beginning, he understood, humans had built a lot of robot soldiers. Technically there had to be some earlier beginning where someone or something built humans, and so on ad infinitum, but Uncharles felt that was of diminishing relevance and needlessly metaphysical.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

178. “He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death. It had been a rough few weeks.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

179. “When one of the kitchen domestics had begun breaking plates, it had only been on the third breakage that the unit had been retired as unfit for purpose. Given the considerable investment in domestic service that Charles represented, surely he should be allowed to murder three, or even five people before being deemed irreparably unfit for service.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

180. “They were stupid!” he got out through clenched fangs. “Stupid and blind and limited! And I tried to tell them! I said everything I could to show how murderous and merciless and terrible you – we – you are! But they thought they knew best. They had to challenge you. They dared encroach on the world of humanity. And that means death. I know that now. It always means death.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

181. “Sage-Archivist Ochelby had a kindly face. It crinkled in pleasant, paternal ways when he was conducting the more demanding tasks his position required. Such as deconstructing primitive magical belief systems – a task that often involved deconstructing primitive magicians.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

182. “Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay. Neither of which seemed to be natural behaviour for wolves, but Uncharles could only assume this was another aspect of his undiagnosed defect. He let them fight until one ate the other.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

183. “For the Armigers, it had been a boon, money hand over fist and a tame population of serfs to turn the cranks and get their fingers caught between the wheels. Each complex act of craftsmanship reduced to a score of unskilled stages that anybody could complete. No more fussy mastercrafters with their demands and standards. Every part of the machine replaceable, especially the human element.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

184. “Just because the tyrant dresses like a clown doesn’t mean he’s funny.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

186. “Every revolutionary group I ever knew spent far longer clutching for how to describe what they were than talking about what they were going to do.”

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

197. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky

199. “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

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

— Adrian Tchaikovsky