Top 40 John C. Wright Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.”

— John C. Wright

2. “A wasteland is a confrontation to a man of stature: an empty place, a gauntlet thrown down in challenge and defiance. A place like that cries out to be conquered and civilised.”

— John C. Wright

3. “I can’t wait to get my memory back. It sounds like I am a really cool person.”

— John C. Wright

4. “Pain has a funny way of focusing the mind. Only what hurts matters.”

— John C. Wright

5. “This world is behind enemy lines. Secret powers rule it. But they don’t want to kill us with bombs or knives. They want even worse for us. They want to kill the better part of us, the part that hopes. Illnesses and accidents are weapons in their hands, weapons of despair, meant to turn our thoughts down and down to dark and dismal paths.”

— John C. Wright

6. “My mom once told me, back when I was a kid, that I would never understand girls unless I understood the fear of being lonely and alone. She said no girl would ever understand boys unless she understood the fear of being dishonored and defeated.”

— John C. Wright

7. “In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. – The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 183.”

— John C. Wright

8. “If Vulcans had a church, they’d be Catholics.”

— John C. Wright

9. “When power is the only coin, they said, you have nothing left to sell but your soul.”

— John C. Wright

10. “I did not call for the extermination of people, but of ideas.”

— John C. Wright

11. “The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I’d like to believe in that dream whether it’s true or not.”

— John C. Wright

12. “We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right?” And here I was hoping we’d be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.”

— John C. Wright

13. “The first kind of problems are the ones life sends upon you to test you, to make you humble or make you longsuffering, or whatever you may need.”

— John C. Wright

14. “One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature.”

— John C. Wright

15. “Being told that he was immune to flattery was the nicest thing he had heard someone say about him in a long time.”

— John C. Wright

16. “Truth destroys the worst in man; pleasure destroys the best. If you love truth more than happiness, then open; otherwise, let rest.” His.”

— John C. Wright

17. “Indeed, I propose the idea that confusing strength with masculinity is in truth not a feminist ideal, but a misogynistic idea. He is no friend of woman who says women must act masculine to be equal to men, because that merely makes the word ‘feminine’ equal ‘inferior’.”

— John C. Wright

18. “So it is not the danger that creeps people out. It is something else. Something uncanny. An aura of madness. Even with his face hidden, I could see Enmeduranki had it.”

— John C. Wright

19. “Here is our first rule: Any life you create is yours, and must be cared for. No matter how humble or small, it is still yours, and you must answer for it.”

— John C. Wright

20. “The first kind builds character. You cannot grow without this kind of problem, any more than you can build muscles without exercise.”

— John C. Wright

21. “Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who know it are many or few.”

— John C. Wright

22. “The suffering we bring on ourselves, we can ask to be taken away from us once we repent of it. The suffering sent to instruct us, we can ask for the strength to endure, and the humbleness to be instructed.”

— John C. Wright

23. “Even a prison the size of a universe is still a prison. And it is every prisoner’s duty to escape.”

— John C. Wright

24. “Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.”

— John C. Wright

25. “Son, different rules apply during the End of the World.” I did not know what to say to that.”

— John C. Wright

26. “That’s not fair! You can’t talk back to the Tales! They are all we have!”

— John C. Wright

27. “Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.”

— John C. Wright

28. “The future did not arrive.”

— John C. Wright

29. “The Blue Man smiled. “Why not wipe out all life in the great dark beyond? All other life, that is. All the competition. They did not overlook or forget about the Earth! They cleared the fields for her. Then they traveled backward in time to restart the universe with Man on top, right at the initial condition set. Why not?”

— John C. Wright

30. “The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols ‘abstract’ complexity from observed objects.”

— John C. Wright

31. “The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt.”

— John C. Wright

32. “A sane accusation can be refuted. An insane accusation, one that makes no sense on any level, cannot be refuted, cannot even be addressed, because it is insolent nonsense. There is no sober way to defend oneself from the accusation of being a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.”

— John C. Wright

33. “Vows are powerful things,” he said. “They set things in motion.”

— John C. Wright

34. “What if they found a trapdoor out of this dead universe? A hole? A black hole? A place where the tyranny of time and space couldn’t reach?”

— John C. Wright

35. “War is fundamental. A man’s views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life.”

— John C. Wright

36. “The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves.”

— John C. Wright

37. “Human nature, for better or worse, always eventually comes to the fore again. And human nature likes and needs stories that are stories.”

— John C. Wright

38. “Euryphaean, and the music of an instrument called a pianoforte, infinite resistance coil and the sanity glass, and all the inventions that sprang from.”

— John C. Wright

39. “Men’s souls are crooked and unsound things, not good materials out of which to build friendships, families, households, cities, civilizations. But good or no, these things must be built, and we must craft them with the materials at hand, and make as strong and stubborn redoubt as we can make, lest the horrors of the Night should triumph over us, not in some distant age to come, but now.”

— John C. Wright

40. “The second kind you make yourself. Most people, most of their lives, most of their problems, they simply invite into their lives, sweep out a guestroom for each pain, and give it free lodging and board.”

— John C. Wright