Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Truly clever things are said with short words. Long ones are used to hide stupidity.”

— Joe Abercrombie

152. “Funny how, whenever men talked about freedom, they never really meant for the women.”

— Joe Abercrombie

153. “You want a thing when you can’t have it. When you get it you suddenly sprout doubts. Then when you think you might lose it you find you need it worse than ever.”

— Joe Abercrombie

154. “If a man seeks to change the world, he should first understand it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

155. “He was naked aside from a cloth tied round his waist. To spare the delicate sensibilities of the ladies present. Watching a man’s entrails spilling out is excellent entertainment, but the sight of his cock, well, that would be obscene. A.”

— Joe Abercrombie

156. “I am ready to die, but I refuse to lose.”

— Joe Abercrombie

157. “In my experience, a friend is merely an acquaintance who has yet to betray you.”

— Joe Abercrombie

158. “It always catches people by surprise, the moment of their death, even when they should see it coming. They always think they’re special, somehow expect a reprieve. But no one’s special.”

— Joe Abercrombie

159. “Some men are made for doing violence. Some are meant for planning it. Then there are a special few whose talent is for taking the credit.”

— Joe Abercrombie

160. “The most civilized place in the world,” murmured Father Yarvi. “Though that mostly means folk prefer to stab each other in the back than in the front.”

— Joe Abercrombie

161. “The Shanka might be ever so full of mad fury, but even they had to fear him. Everything did. Even the dead, who felt no pain. Even the cold stone, which did not dream. Even the molten iron feared the Bloody-Nine. Even the darkness.”

— Joe Abercrombie

162. “Dogman remembered the smell of her hair, the sound of her laugh, the feel of her back, pressed warm and soft against his belly while she slept. Well-used memories, picked over and worn thin like a favourite shirt.”

— Joe Abercrombie

163. “Government is tyranny. At its best it is dressed in pretty colours.”

— Joe Abercrombie

164. “When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it. Goes double for the ones you tell yourself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

165. “Damn, he was bored. It was a fact, he was only now beginning to realise, that the conversation of the drunk is only interesting to the drunk. A few glasses on wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.”

— Joe Abercrombie

166. “Years, back, when they first made him a sergeant, he’d imagined the officers much have all the answers. When he was given his commission, he’d imagined the generals must have all the answers. When King Orso made him a general, he’d imagined the Closed counsel bust have all the answers. Now, as a lord marshal, he finally knew it for an absolute fact. No one had the answers. Worse. There weren’t any.”

— Joe Abercrombie

167. “Gratitude and resentment are brothers eternal, after all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

168. “They say it’s men with nothing to lose you should fear. But it’s them who fear most.”

— Joe Abercrombie

169. “Believe it or not, we all want what’s best. The root o’ the world’s ills is that no one can agree on what it is.”

— Joe Abercrombie

170. “Men can have all manner of deeply held beliefs about the world in general that they find most inconvenient when called upon to apply to their own lives. Few people let morality get in the way of expediency. Or even convenience. A man who truly believes in a thing beyond the point where it costs him is a rare and dangerous thing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

171. “What’s the plan now, then?’ ‘Plans have a habit o’ falling apart when you lean on ’em,’ said Lamb. ‘We’ll just have to think up another.’ The Kantic cracked a bastard of a frown. ‘I do not like a man who breaks an agreement.’ ‘Try and push me off a cliff.’ Lamb gave Jubair a flat stare. ‘We can find out who God likes best.’ Jubair pressed one fingertip against his lips and considered that for a long, silent moment. Then he shrugged. ‘I prefer not to trouble God with every little thing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

172. “To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike.”

— Joe Abercrombie

173. “I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.”

— Joe Abercrombie

174. “The elves knew the true names of these rivers,’ said Skifr, who’d made a kind of bed among the cargo to drape herself on. ‘We call them Divine and Denied because those are as close as our clumsy human tongues can come.”

— Joe Abercrombie

175. “He had always thought of civilisation as a machine, cast from rigid iron, everything riveted in its proper place. Now he saw it was a fabric gauzy as a bride’s veil. A tissue everyone agrees to leave in place, but one that can be ripped away in an instant. And hell lurks just beneath.”

— Joe Abercrombie

176. “Strong leaders might like it when someone brings ’em a better idea. But weak ones never do.”

— Joe Abercrombie

177. “I apologise if I bore you!’ ‘I accept your apology.’ ‘I was joking!’ ‘Ah. Your wit is so very sharp I hardly noticed I was cut.”

— Joe Abercrombie

178. “Bravery is the dead man’s virtue.”

— Joe Abercrombie

179. “There’s nothing worth less than what men think of you after you’re back in the mud.”

— Joe Abercrombie

180. “The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that. The casualties are many.”

— Joe Abercrombie

181. “There’s always a worse case than your worst case, and more often than not, it happens.”

— Joe Abercrombie

182. “And so the doubts begin... Our doom draws nearer, and every man sees it. A strange thing, death. Far away, you can laugh at it, but as it comes closer it looks worse and worse. Close enough to touch, and no one laughs.”

— Joe Abercrombie

183. “When God means to punish a man He sends him stupid friends and clever enemies.”

— Joe Abercrombie

184. “People without hope are a dangerous crowd, even in a republic.”

— Joe Abercrombie

185. “Guilt is a luxury reserved for those still breathing and with no unbearable pain, cold or hunger demanding all their fickle attention. Long as guilt’s your biggest problem, girl... ” Rikke saw the faint gleam of Isern’s teeth in the gathering darkness. “Things can’t be that bad”.”

— Joe Abercrombie

186. “There’s always good men on both sides of a good fight.”

— Joe Abercrombie

187. “Why do I do this?”

— Joe Abercrombie

188. “Along with the constant pain was the constant need to pretend you weren’t in pain at all, as though the worst thing about your agony was that it might put other people out.”

— Joe Abercrombie

189. “People liked to think of beauty as some natural gift, but Savine firmly believed that just about anyone could be beautiful, if they worked hard at it and spent enough money. It was merely a question of emphasising the good, disguising the bad and painfully squeezing the average into the most impressive configuration. Very much like business, really.”

— Joe Abercrombie

190. “You have to pick your moment. He’d always said so. Told everyone who’d listen. Have to recognise it when it comes, and seize it, with no care for the past and no worries about the future.”

— Joe Abercrombie

191. “The sad truth is, men love to follow a man other men fear,” said Clover. “Makes them feel fearsome, too. We tell the odd fond story of the good men. The straight edges. Your Rudd Threetrees, your Dogmen. But it’s the butchers men love to sing of. The burners and the blood-spillers. Your Cracknut Whirruns and your Black Dows. Your Bloody-Nines. Men don’t dream of doing the right thing, but of ripping what they want from the world with their strength and their will.”

— Joe Abercrombie

192. “Cause my mother says boys whine about what’s done. Men decide what will be.” “You always listen to your mother?” “I complain about it, but yes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

193. “In violent times folk like to kneel to violent men. In peaceful times they remember they’re happier standing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

194. “Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.”

— Joe Abercrombie

195. “It’s a hard world. No one gets what they deserve.”

— Joe Abercrombie

196. “Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse’ Joseph Brodsky.”

— Joe Abercrombie

197. “Call it art, you can get away with anything.”

— Joe Abercrombie

198. “But you know what they say – old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter.”

— Joe Abercrombie

199. “Never take eggs from a metal-eyed man.”

— Joe Abercrombie

200. “Just keep in mind what Rudd Threetrees once told me. Let’s us get them killed, and not the other way round.’ Wonderful grinned. ‘Best damn advice about war I ever heard.”

— Joe Abercrombie