Top 35 John Christopher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is always something to lose. But maybe more to gain.”

— John Christopher

2. “I think before I act – and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.”

— John Christopher

3. “What value did courage have, without a free and challenging mind to direct it?”

— John Christopher

4. “We had been friends. We could not become strangers. It left only one thing: we must be enemies.”

— John Christopher

5. “The secret of success in battle lies often not so much in the use of one’s own strength but in the exploitation of the other side’s weaknesses.”

— John Christopher

6. “You would always beat me; not so much because you are a better fighter as because you will not accept defeat.”

— John Christopher

7. “Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.”

— John Christopher

8. “We all have to learn to live with our losses, and to use our regrets to spur us on in the future.”

— John Christopher

9. “Some people are oil and water.”

— John Christopher

10. “His anger was as great as mine, but hot where mine was cold.”

— John Christopher

11. “It is because they are so strong that she hides her feelings.”

— John Christopher

12. “And though I remember her name I cannot recall her face. All things pass.”

— John Christopher

13. “There are times when thinking about something is the worst possible policy.”

— John Christopher

14. “What men do matters more than what they know.”

— John Christopher

15. “As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.”

— John Christopher

16. “What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.”

— John Christopher

17. “Before all this is over... are we going to hate ourselves? Or are we just going to get used to things, so that we don’t realise what we’re turning into?”

— John Christopher

18. “More and more I had come to see the Capped as lacking what seemed to me the essence of humanity, the vital spark of defiance against the rulers of the world.”

— John Christopher

19. “He was sometimes stern but more often kindly – just according to his lights, but he saw the world in simple shades of black and white, and found it hard to be patient with things that struck him as foolishness.”

— John Christopher

20. “The moors themselves were barer, of course. The heather still grew, but the moorland grasses were gone; the outcrops of rocks jutted like teeth in the head of a skull.”

— John Christopher

21. “Fritz was melancholic by nature, and could tolerate his own gloom. I do not think this is so with you, who are sanguine and impatient. In your case, remorse and despondency could be crippling.”

— John Christopher

22. “In the realm of dream and imagination all men are equal.”

— John Christopher

23. “Their perfume a ghost of summers long ago.”

— John Christopher

24. “Living with guns, as I have done, one loses the habit of looking for gentleness in men.”

— John Christopher

25. “Funny creatures, women. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they do the sensible thing without hesitation. The hundredth time they do the other with the same enthusiasm.”

— John Christopher

26. “It is no good being able to make a rabbit pie, unless you can first catch your rabbit.”

— John Christopher

27. “Because without being yourself, an individual, you weren’t really alive.”

— John Christopher

28. “Then I went to the windows and pulled them open. The rain had stopped and the night was very still, black except for the glow behind the western hills that marked the Burning Lands. A dog barked far off, once and no more.”

— John Christopher

29. “I hadn’t realized that misery maybe got worse the older you were.”

— John Christopher

30. “Having achieved what I thought was an ultimate ambition, I found, as I think is often the case, that there remained something more.”

— John Christopher

31. “What I was suddenly aware of was the importance of their being whatever each of them was – cocky and contemptuous, or bothered and beaten – as long as it was something they’d come to in their own way: the importance of being human, in fact. The peace and harmony Uncle Ian and the others claimed to be handing out in fact was death, because without being yourself, an individual, you weren’t really alive.”

— John Christopher

32. “Even though brutality used toward the young, by reason of their defenselessness, provoked greater anger and greater pity, it was still true that they were resilient. Was the wind tempered to the shorn lamb? He grimaced. All the lambs were shorn now, and the wind was from the northeast, full of ice and black frost.”

— John Christopher

33. “A man faced death, but when death drew back forgot it until the next time.”

— John Christopher

34. “And a leader has to command confidence, and consent.”

— John Christopher

35. “To voice doubts was unthinkable, but that did not means that doubts did not exist.”

— John Christopher

36. “Truth does not surround itself with lies.”

— John Christopher