Top 90 Christopher Ruocchio Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Always accuse the enemy of what you’re doing.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

2. “You cannot lead as a tyrant. The people under you will not let you. To lead is a kind of service, a duty you owe to those who follow.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

3. “Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

4. “A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

5. “We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom, these are as much part of our universe as light and gravity.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

6. “True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

7. “The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

8. “But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

9. “Always forward, always down, and never left or right.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

10. “The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

11. “The greater part of wisdom is in silence.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

12. “To love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

13. “Augustine once said that if there are such things as the past and the future, they do not exist as such but are only the present in their own times. The past, he says, exists only in memory and the future only in expectation. Neither is real.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

14. “As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

15. “Great is Truth, and mighty above all things.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

16. “The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

17. “It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

18. “Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

19. “Sift the sand of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

20. “But the truth is poor poetry.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

21. “Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

22. “But folk ain’t that different, one-to-one, no matter what’s on the outside. Doesn’t even matter where you been. Hurt the same, need the same. Need someone to remind them they’re human.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

23. “Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

24. “My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

25. “Men are slower to act from principle than self-interest, and far slower to act on principle than jealousy or revenge.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

26. “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in a crisis.” “And if you had truly read Dante, Marlowe,” Kharn said, voice issuing once more from the drones around me. “You would know the deepest pit of hell is cold.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

27. “We are all shaped by our suffering. That we are only what we are is ever our chiefest sin.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

28. “A fear born of the fact that though we may come back to a place at the end of our journeys, we never really return, for we are not the same person who departed.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

29. “The poets say that one’s fears grow less with trial, that we become men without fear if tried enough. I have not found it to be so. Rather, on each occasion we are tested, we become stronger than our fears. It is all we can do. Must do. Lest we perish for our failings.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

30. “I have stopped believing that it is up to any man to decide what other men deserve. I have met saints punished for their virtues and monsters praised for their monstrosity. I have been both sorts of creature.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

31. “Better to let them be fools. There are some arguments you can’t win without violence. Like I’m always telling you, reason has its limits.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

32. “We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

33. “How can we ever hope to prevail against such demons, I ask you?” “By being demons ourselves, sire,” I said.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

34. “Who was it said you could move planets with a big enough lever? Shakespeare?” “Archimedes,” I said, leaning against the rail. “You always know,” Lin said, a small laugh escaping him. “How is it you always know?” “I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

35. “It was a privilege fighting for you, Hadrian.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

36. “But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

37. “Standing among my final friends in all the universe, I raised my sword and laughed.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

38. “It was ironic that the same people who had enacted nuclear war on the Homeworld, who presided over the refugee camps and rotted the ecosphere, had balked in the face of blood sport. Would they call us barbarians, those men of ancient days?”

— Christopher Ruocchio

39. “Joy is rare, a thing always of the now, existing without regard for time past or time future, and without depending on them.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

40. “That may be, but my tutor always told me that all heroes are fools until victorious.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

41. “Let us move to the only beginning I’ve a right to: my own.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

42. “There is no future,” the seer replied. “Everything already is. They have only to choose.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

43. “But then, so few of us truly think themselves evil. They simply think good and evil matters of opinion, and seek to impose their opinion – which is evil – on good. Nothing is evil in its beginning, it only grows that way.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

44. “The frightened man eats himself.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

45. “The worlds have enough of tyrants, enough of murderers and genocides.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

46. “Against such demons as these, all men are brothers.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

47. “That devil has long escaped its bottle.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

48. “Religion and science are old enemies,” Imlarros said. Gibson cleared his throat, and in a thin voice strained by the descent, said, “They’re not, brother. Only fools think so.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

49. “Ti abatre!” she yelled. I loved you. Loved. The hatch sealed. Our shuttle tore out past the static field and into the long and silent Dark.”

— Christopher Ruocchio

50. “A man is the sum of his memories – and more – he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them.”

— Christopher Ruocchio