Top 30 Dan Abnett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.”

— Dan Abnett

2. “I was there, the day that Horus killed the Emperor.”

— Dan Abnett

3. “I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude – we’ve proven that time and time again. People are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and force action. They kill and revive, corrupt and cure.”

— Dan Abnett

4. “In the grim darkness of the far future there is more than war. There are real people there too.”

— Dan Abnett

5. “The difference between gods and daemons largely depends upon where one is standing at the time.”

— Dan Abnett

6. “Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he’s got the wisdom and morals of a god to match. There’s nothing feeble about my moral line. I value life. That is why I fight to protect it. I mourn every man I lose and every sacrifice I make. One life or a billion, they’re all lives.”

— Dan Abnett

7. “Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete. A true man may flinch away its embrace, if he is stalwart, and he girds his soul with the armour of contempt.”

— Dan Abnett

8. “In my experience, the heavy-handed, terror-inspiring approach closes as many doors as it smashes open.”

— Dan Abnett

9. “Rebuild your world, rebuild your race, rebuild your empire. Rebuild it all. But make sure you rebuild your ideals too. Rebuild the principles that made you a great and honorable galactic power in the first place. Don’t prey on the weak. Don’t steal from the helpless. Don’t murder the innocent. Be a force for good, not a force for yourself.”

— Dan Abnett

10. “Reverse your thinking. Positivity is psychologically rewarding.”

— Dan Abnett

11. “Regard the books,’ Sindermann said. ‘Are there some I should read? Will you prepare a list for me?’ ‘Read them all. Read them again. Swallow the learning and ideas of our predecessors whole, for it can only improve you as a man, but if you do, you’ll find that none of them holds an answer to still your doubts.”

— Dan Abnett

12. “If he speaks again without me knowing who he is, I will throw him out of the window. And I won’t open it first.”

— Dan Abnett

13. “Locally, there were other phrases that had come into coin, phrases the administry did not encourage at all. ‘If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing in triplicate’, ‘Those who shred history are doomed to repeat it’ and ‘I file everything, therefore I know nothing’ were three of the most popular.”

— Dan Abnett

14. “The true purpose of mankind is to bear the torch of truth aloft and shine it, even into the darkest places.”

— Dan Abnett

15. “We pick up the pieces, Donna. Some of them are broken.”

— Dan Abnett

16. “She was back on the island. On Yamatai. A hellish storm raged all around her.”

— Dan Abnett

17. “Do I look evil? I can’t do evil. I can barely pull off dangerous.”

— Dan Abnett

18. “Mechanical wrecks, sobbing out plumes of black smoke, marred the sugar-white perfection of the pass.”

— Dan Abnett

19. “I’m not going to fight them, you fool. I’m going to kill them. – Malus Darkblade.”

— Dan Abnett

20. “He realized that, despite the dangers and alarms of the day, waiting was perhaps the worst thing of all.”

— Dan Abnett

21. “Have you noticed we can breathe in here too? Gosh, I wouldn’t have picked up on that.”

— Dan Abnett

22. “Perhaps we are cursed,” Karkasy told the empty fane, “to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves.”

— Dan Abnett

23. “They’re so busy playing, they’ve taken their eyes off the board.”

— Dan Abnett

24. “I realised Larkin was crying. It shook me to see it. And, though I know what you’re thinking, it didn’t diminish him in any way. I’d known from the first moment I saw him he was an emotionally vulnerable man. He didn’t falter in his duty for a moment. He kept up the pace, covered all the angles he was asked to. He didn’t even seem to be aware that he was crying. But he wept.”

— Dan Abnett

25. “It remains a sad truth of the Imperium that virtually no veteran ever comes back from fighting its wars intact. Combat alone shreds nerves and shatters bodies. But the horrors of the warp, and of foul xenos forms like the tyranid, steal sanity forever, and leave veterans fearing the shadows, and the night and, sometimes, the nature of their friends and neighbours, for the rest of their lives.”

— Dan Abnett

26. “Warriors always seek the brotherhood of their kind.”

— Dan Abnett

27. “In war, best know what enemies are around you in your own camp, before you step out to face the foe and wonder why you do so alone.”

— Dan Abnett

28. “There will always be another goal, another prospect.”

— Dan Abnett

29. “We will spend our lives fighting to secure this Imperium, and then I fear we will spend the rest of our days fighting to keep it intact. There is such involving darkness amongst the stars. Even when the Imperium is complete, there will be no peace. We will be obliged to fight on to preserve what we have fought to establish. Peace is a vain wish. Our crusade may one day adopt another name, but it will never truly end. In the far future, there will be only war.”

— Dan Abnett

30. “Sometimes the threat is so grave, the worst of enemies must become the best of friends.”

— Dan Abnett

31. “Long ago, an edict was made by the planetary government that only certain fields of land could ever be used for burial. So cemetery space is at an optimum. Hence, the Law of Decipherability.’ ‘Which is?’ ‘The law states that once the eroding hands of time and the elements have made the last names on a field’s gravestones illegible, the anonymous dead may be exhumed, the bones buried in a pit, and the field reused.”

— Dan Abnett

32. “Do you think me weak, flawed? Do you hate me for setting my Inquisitorial role above the needs of one agonised being?”

— Dan Abnett

33. “But he knows, and I know, and you know, that any defence is only as strong as its weakest part: faith, belief, trust.”

— Dan Abnett

34. “You have to understand the rules in the first place if you’re going to break them.”

— Dan Abnett