Top 80 David Lagercrantz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Killing the world with lies. Giving the leaders The power to paralyze Feeding the murderers with hate, Amputate, devastate, congratulate. But never, never Apologize.”

— David Lagercrantz

2. “This isn’t a negotiation, it’s not even a conversation. I’m just setting out the terms, that’s all.”

— David Lagercrantz

3. “Those who spy on the people end up themselves being spied on by the people.”

— David Lagercrantz

4. “So the very instant we create a superintelligence we lose control, is that right?” “The risk is that everything we know about the world will cease to be relevant, and it’ll be the end of human existence.”

— David Lagercrantz

5. “The sum of all vices does not remain constant. Each one breeds another.”

— David Lagercrantz

6. “Ha, no, that it’s always the wrong people who have the guilty conscience. Those who are really responsible for suffering in the world couldn’t care less. It’s the ones fighting for good who are consumed by remorse.”

— David Lagercrantz

7. “Sometimes things go wrong, no matter how careful you are.”

— David Lagercrantz

8. “The dignity of a society is defined by the way it looks after its weakest members.”

— David Lagercrantz

9. “Are you insane?” “Probably, yes,” she said. “Empathy deficit disorder. Excessive violence. Something along those lines.”

— David Lagercrantz

10. “If God is indeed omnipotent, is he then capable of creating something more intelligent than himself?”

— David Lagercrantz

11. “Many people feel they are missing someone.”

— David Lagercrantz

12. “Given his age, Jan Bublanski was afraid of many things. But perhaps he feared the absence of doubt most of all. He was a man of faith who was uncomfortable in the face of convictions too strongly held or over-simplified explanations. He was forever producing counter-arguments and contrary hypotheses. Nothing was so certain that it could not be challenged one more time.”

— David Lagercrantz

13. “Who knows, perhaps the will to please leads people to crime as often as evil or greed does. People want to fit in and do well, and they do indescribably stupid things because of it. Is that what happened here?”

— David Lagercrantz

14. “Everything has its time.”

— David Lagercrantz

15. “Those who spy on the people end up themselves being spied on by the people. There’s a fundamental democratic logic to it.”

— David Lagercrantz

16. “Well, don’t tell me that sexual freedom was Stalin’s lasting contribution to mankind.”

— David Lagercrantz

17. “How come all lunatics and murderers are religious these days?”

— David Lagercrantz

18. “When the noise died down, she could lose herself in mathematics – in attempts to combine quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity – and forget the world around her.”

— David Lagercrantz

19. “Just think if life could be like that sometimes... If joy could express itself with the same force as pain.”

— David Lagercrantz

20. “Life often looks its best from a distance.”

— David Lagercrantz

21. “These days you can’t do a goddamn thing online without leaving footprints.”

— David Lagercrantz

22. “They locked her up and kept trying to break her. But she kept coming back, and do you know what I think?” “No.” “She got stronger each time. She became positively lethal.”

— David Lagercrantz

23. “I like stupid questions,” Rimmer said. “They allow one to feel intelligent for once.”

— David Lagercrantz

24. “He understood immediately, and asked, ‘What about the fire the dragon is breathing?’ I said it was the same fire that burns inside everyone who is being trampled on. The same fire that can turn us into ashes and waste, but which sometimes, if some old fool like Holger spots us, plays chess with us and talks to us and just takes an interest, can become something totally different: a force which allows us to strike back.”

— David Lagercrantz

25. “Wait, Ed. Did you say she?” “You better believe it. Our hacker’s a she!”

— David Lagercrantz

26. “She suspected that she was quite like Helena Kraft in that she was capable and ambitious and wanted to get a pat on the back from her superiors. That was not necessarily always a good thing though. With that tendency, if you operate in an unhealthy culture you risk becoming just as unhealthy yourself and – who knows, perhaps it is the will to please that leads people to crime just as often as evil or greed.”

— David Lagercrantz

27. “Sometimes the best ideas occur to you while your mind is occupied with something completely different.”

— David Lagercrantz

28. “One could inflict abuses on ethnic and other minorities in the name of science and for the good of society and get away with it.”

— David Lagercrantz

29. “I now realize that I should blame myself when men indulge in such wildly wishful thinking that they see a sexual invitation in a simple smile.”

— David Lagercrantz

30. “It is impossible to overestimate how humourless underpaid journalists can be.”

— David Lagercrantz

31. “Hilda observed that science always loses its way when guided by ideology or wishful thinking.”

— David Lagercrantz

32. “The pace of growth goes on increasing and in the end it escapes our control.”

— David Lagercrantz

33. “Life is constantly treating us to illusory connections.”

— David Lagercrantz

34. “She saw more melody in a differential equation than in a piece by Beethoven.”

— David Lagercrantz

35. “Gut feeling is often a better tool than all the psychological theories in the world.”

— David Lagercrantz

36. “A man who can make love with another man can also make love with the enemy.”

— David Lagercrantz

37. “Those who are different, also have a tendency to think differently.”

— David Lagercrantz

38. “People are so unnecessarily negative about envy. It really ought to be struck off the list of deadly sins.”

— David Lagercrantz

39. “It wasn’t just escapism, he persuaded himself. Sometimes the best ideas occur to you while your mind is occupied with something completely different. Pieces of the puzzle can suddenly fall into place.”

— David Lagercrantz

40. “Lies as a way of creating chaos and confusion. Lies as an alternative to violence.”

— David Lagercrantz

41. “He was little more than a hammer with which to beat people over the head, an instrument for.”

— David Lagercrantz

42. “Salander was up at 5:00 the next morning and hacked into the NSF Major Research Instrumentation supercomputer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology – she needed all the mathematical skills she could muster.”

— David Lagercrantz

43. “It strengthened his long-held conviction that one must never underestimate anyone or cling to preconceived ideas.”

— David Lagercrantz

44. “Life often looks its best from a distance. He was yet to understand that.”

— David Lagercrantz

45. “Heredity and environment interact constantly, Hilda wrote. We seek out occurrences and activities which stimulate our genes and make them flourish, and we avoid things which frighten us or make us uncomfortable.”

— David Lagercrantz

46. “Hilda argued that our fate is more likely determined by what she called our “unique environment” – the one we do not share with anyone, not even our siblings. It is the environment we seek out and create for ourselves, for example, when we find something which delights and fascinates us and drives us in a certain direction.”

— David Lagercrantz

47. “He might be quick to smile and adept at handing out compliments, but his smile never reached his eyes.”

— David Lagercrantz

48. “Kim Peek, for example, who was the basis for Rain Man, was severely mentally handicapped and could not get dressed by himself. Yet he had memorized twelve thousand books and could give a lightning-quick answer to almost any factual question.”

— David Lagercrantz

49. “Thank you, dear doctor, for curing me of my delusions. But what do you have to offer me instead?”

— David Lagercrantz

50. “With a gang of sharp lawyers you can safely steal whatever you like. Lawyers are the hit men of our times.”

— David Lagercrantz