Top 40 Daniel Polansky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s a dangerous thing, pretense. A man ought to know who he is, even if he isn’t proud to be it.”

— Daniel Polansky

2. “Odd, but no matter how high you rise in the halls of power, it’s impossible to escape the conviction that our collective fates are largely determined by the petty jealousies of overgrown adolescents.”

— Daniel Polansky

3. “Because it’s a lit fuse, love – you light it yourself, and you stand around the powder keg afterward, grinning from ear to ear.”

— Daniel Polansky

4. “It’s an odd fact about lunatics and junkies, but every one I’d ever met is just dying to share their life wisdom.”

— Daniel Polansky

5. “There are some things a man can’t fake, and lethality is one of them – a lapdog might learn to howl, even bare its teeth on occasion, but that don’t make it a wolf.”

— Daniel Polansky

6. “Power isn’t something you sit on, it’s something you chase after. And it moves fast – if you want to hold onto it, you’d better not burden yourself with anything as heavy as decency.”

— Daniel Polansky

7. “Time is the name humans use to describe the expansion of the universe. It’s used to arrange events in sequence, and generally to avoid going mad.”

— Daniel Polansky

8. “I know none of that’s true, of course – your impulse for self-destruction is too sharp to be anything but authentic.”

— Daniel Polansky

9. “For a while a person is a junkie and a bartender or a junkie and a father or a junkie and a thief, but after a while he’s just a junkie.”

— Daniel Polansky

10. “Thus far, the best that could be said for the day was that it was half over.”

— Daniel Polansky

11. “Our language has yet to develop a proper send-off for leaving a close friend’s deathbed.”

— Daniel Polansky

12. “He was as happy as a pup on Christmas morning, as a maid on her wedding night, as a wolf before his bloody red supper.”

— Daniel Polansky

13. “A Frenchman, as any Frenchman will tell you, is a difficult condition to abide, as much a privilege as a responsibility. To maintain the appropriate standards of excellence, this superlative of grace, was a burden not so light even in the homeland, and immeasurably more difficult in the colonies. Being both French and a stoat had resulted in a more or less constant crisis of self-identity – one which Bonsoir often worked to resolve, in classic Gallic fashion, via monologue.”

— Daniel Polansky

14. “The Captain was halfway to the door when he felt the press of metal against his throat. “I am Bonsoir,” the stoat hissed, a scant inch from the Captain’s ears. “I have cracked rattlesnake eggs while their mother slept soundly atop them, I have snatched the woodpecker mid-flight. More have met their end at my hand than from corn liquor and poisoned bait! I am Bonsoir, whose steps fall without sound, whose knives are always sharp, who comes at night and leaves widows weeping in the morning.”

— Daniel Polansky

15. “I’d heard that in some of the newer mental wards they set the mad and congenitally stupid to rote tasks, having them sew buttons onto mounds of fabric, the futile labor working as a salve to their broken minds. I wonder sometimes whether the guard is not an extension of this therapy on a far grander scale, an elaborate social program meant to give the low functioning an illusion of purpose.”

— Daniel Polansky

16. “Somewhere along the line people reduce themselves to numbers in a ledger, and at that point you’re truly damned. It’s a rather concise definition of power – when you no longer need to look at the names.”

— Daniel Polansky

17. “The Quaker did not scream: not when the blood began to come swiftly down his face, not when the force of Elf’s attack carried both of them tumbling out over the walls and down into the ether, the desperate and hoped-for outcome, a fatal embrace descending, together forever, into the darkness.”

— Daniel Polansky

18. “If the human race has ever invented an institution more effective in the propagation of intellectual and ethical cripples than the nobility, I have yet to stumble across it.”

— Daniel Polansky

19. “I never give anyone the benefit of the doubt when it comes to stupidity. People do very, very stupid things, and smart people more than most.”

— Daniel Polansky

20. “Every man and woman is distinct from every other. But every mob is the same mob, whether composed of mineworkers or monarchs.”

— Daniel Polansky

21. “Speechifying was never my forte – one on one I can generally figure out what I need to do to get someone moving in my direction, but pool enough of them together and the sheer mass of idiocy becomes immobile.”

— Daniel Polansky

22. “I leaned back into my chair, folded my arms together and made like I was pondering. ‘I understand. You’re worried about the future.’ ‘Damn right.’ ‘Let me tell you something about the future – it isn’t the present. And in the present I’m guaranteeing you that there’s nothing that your supplier will do to you tomorrow that I won’t do to you today, now, right this very moment. Might as well postpone getting dead. When you think about it, isn’t that all we’re ever doing?”

— Daniel Polansky

23. “I’m not agitated,’ I said. ‘I’m just violent. What gets done to you will be the consequence of cautious premeditation.”

— Daniel Polansky

24. “The dangerous men were still asleep, their blades sheathed next to their beds. The really dangerous men had been up for hours, and their quills and ledgers were getting hard use.”

— Daniel Polansky

25. “I’ve heard people speak of themselves as addicted to reading, but I think those people never stole from their family so they could afford this month’s serial, or sucked off a sailor for a new book of short stories.”

— Daniel Polansky

26. “Mexico doesn’t have an emperor.” “That is Mexico’s misfortune, for all of the greatest countries have emperors.”

— Daniel Polansky

27. “The lower you are on the pole, the more events seem to be governed by chance. Climb up a few steps and you realize that there’s an order to the whole thing, the dice are loaded and the cards well marked.”

— Daniel Polansky

28. “The rows of empty jugs had multiplied with the speed of caged rabbits.”

— Daniel Polansky

29. “I am. I like my skull. It’s got all my thoughts inside.”

— Daniel Polansky

30. “Evil is best served without a patina of hypocrisy.”

— Daniel Polansky

31. “Really, I have to applaud you. Anyone can kill, but to break a man? To reach inside him and make him something else? That takes talent.”

— Daniel Polansky

32. “The two old friends stood silently in the fading light, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. That they were old friends, I mean. Anyone could see it was getting dark.”

— Daniel Polansky

33. “M did not like communities, which were usually filled with people, whom M liked even less.”

— Daniel Polansky

34. “The train slowed to a crawl. “What’s below the turtle?” Flemel asked finally. “It’s turtles all the way down,” M informed him, stepping out of the now-open doors.”

— Daniel Polansky

35. “It is a scientific fact that time is infinitely divisible, that each moment contains within it the fragments of a thousand others, and each of them can be splintered into a thousand more, and so on and so on.”

— Daniel Polansky

36. “There is no such thing as truth, there is only belief, and belief is power.”

— Daniel Polansky

37. “A lie was an admission of weakness, evidence that you needed to fear the target of your dishonesty.”

— Daniel Polansky

38. “There was a Brazilian hippie I met once on a path in a jungle near a beach who gave me a half of his coconut, and I never felt that I properly thanked him. So, thanks.”

— Daniel Polansky

39. “And indeed, it was not her steady hand that made Boudica the greatest sniper who had ever sighted down a target. Nor her eyes, eyes that had picked out the Captain long moments before anyone else could have even identified him as a mouse. It was that she understood how to wait, to empty herself of everything in anticipation of that one perfect moment – and then to fill that moment with death.”

— Daniel Polansky

40. “Truly, fear is the better part of human wisdom – one might say that the whole of prudence consists of ranking our fears appropriately, and dealing with each according to the severity of the danger represented.”

— Daniel Polansky

41. “We had enough in common for understanding, but too much for friendship.”

— Daniel Polansky