Top 80 K.J. Parker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no absolute right or wrong, good or evil, but there are good manners and common decency.”

— K.J. Parker

2. “A wise man once said, it’s not the despair that destroys you, it’s the hope.”

— K.J. Parker

3. “Basic fact of life: no matter how far you run, you always take yourself with you.”

— K.J. Parker

4. “Personally, I always feel that survival is cheap at any price and it puzzles me that so many men in authority don’t seem to see it that way.”

— K.J. Parker

5. “A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing.”

— K.J. Parker

6. “We live in a miserable world, where the best we can honestly hope for is that one empty, meaningless day will follow another without things getting actively worse.”

— K.J. Parker

7. “If there’s a truth and nobody knows it, is it still true? Or is it like a light burning in a locked, shuttered house that nobody will ever get to see?”

— K.J. Parker

8. “The easiest way to do anything is properly.”

— K.J. Parker

9. “Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it’s just you and you know you’re basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?”

— K.J. Parker

10. “If there’s one truth in this life, it’s that you simply can’t win. The most you can achieve is to make a nuisance of yourself, for a very short time.”

— K.J. Parker

11. “Faith comes in different tempers: there’s the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can’t cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.”

— K.J. Parker

12. “Better the devil you know, so allow me to introduce myself: I’m the Devil.”

— K.J. Parker

13. “In politics, it’s what isn’t said that matters.”

— K.J. Parker

14. “War is an admission of failure.”

— K.J. Parker

15. “It doesn’t matter if your ignorant so long as you can find people to know stuff for you.”

— K.J. Parker

16. “The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I’ve never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.”

— K.J. Parker

17. “Death is to be feared because of the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason.”

— K.J. Parker

18. “Everyone keeps telling me what I can’t do, but they’re wrong. The only thing I can’t do is nothing.”

— K.J. Parker

19. “It’s sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love because everybody dies but the love they cause to be in others doesn’t die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow therefore love is the greatest evil.”

— K.J. Parker

20. “Always tell as much truth as you can when you’re lying,” he said. “Nothing deceives like the truth.”

— K.J. Parker

21. “Remarkable how often there’s a good reason that masks the real reason.”

— K.J. Parker

22. “Of the people, by the people, for the people. I can’t remember offhand where that quote comes from; it was something to do with some bunch of wild-eyed idealists overthrowing the tyrant so they could become tyrants themselves. No good will have come of it, you can be sure. The people; God help us.”

— K.J. Parker

23. “There’s an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it’s a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm’s way.”

— K.J. Parker

24. “I rarely ask for suggestions, because, when I do, people tend to make them.”

— K.J. Parker

25. “Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers. Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren’t; and here’s a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren’t, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid.”

— K.J. Parker

26. “Of course, I never beat Ogus at anything, unless I cheated. Which I did, whenever I could. I figure, winning is winning. Cheating is just one of many ways of prevailing; just happens to be the way I’m best at.”

— K.J. Parker

27. “I’ve always had this theory, that we’re all born with a certain optimum age, the age we’re really meant to be, and once we reach it we stick there, in our minds, where it counts. Personally I’ve always been twenty-five. I was good at being twenty-five.”

— K.J. Parker

28. “But how do we know it’s really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn’t mean I was telling the truth.”

— K.J. Parker

29. “It’s how I do things. First, despair. Then hope.”

— K.J. Parker

30. “That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail – but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?”

— K.J. Parker

31. “Why are there never eighty soldiers around when you need them?”

— K.J. Parker

32. “The people turn out to be – well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons.”

— K.J. Parker

33. “And lies, of course – It’s like astronomy, I always say. Clever fellows, the astronomers, they can tell ever such a lot about something they can’t see by the shadow it casts over something they can. Same with lies. The shape of a lie will often give you the truth.”

— K.J. Parker

34. “He could feel himself sliding into sleep, there was a dream already open and waiting for him to fall into it.”

— K.J. Parker

35. “I mention this because that’s how the world changes. It’s either so quick that we never know what hit us, or so gradual that we don’t notice.”

— K.J. Parker

36. “I know she comes across as annoying to begin with,” he said. “But once you’ve got to know her a bit better, you’ll find it makes no difference whatsoever.”

— K.J. Parker

37. “Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn’t function if that were the case.”

— K.J. Parker

38. “Memories are tricky; there’s what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup.”

— K.J. Parker

39. “He never makes notes, he just remembers it all, like a barmaid.”

— K.J. Parker

40. “My belief is, either you understand things or you understand people. Nobody can do both. Frankly, I’m happier with things. I understand stuff like tensile strength, shearing force, ductility, work hardening, stress, fatigue. I know the same sort of things happen with people, but the rules are subtly different. And nobody’s ever paid for my time to get to know about people.”

— K.J. Parker

41. “Witnesses are, of course, ambivalent; some of them need record what would otherwise be lost and go to waste, while others need to hunted down and killed before they cant tell what they know; and the man who stands on the grave of the last witness own the truth and is responsible for it, a dangerous trustee.”

— K.J. Parker

42. “I have my faults. But when I hear bad news that’s palpably true, I don’t argue or ask for proof.”

— K.J. Parker

43. “How can anyone doubt the existence of God when evidence of His sense of humour surrounds us on all sides?”

— K.J. Parker

44. “If the world is a book, are you the hero, or just a walk-on part?”

— K.J. Parker

45. “If a man exists who is immune to force, even if he’s the most blameless anchorite living on top of a column in the middle of the desert, he is beyond government, beyond authority, and cannot be controlled; and that would be intolerable.”

— K.J. Parker

46. “I’m starting to get the enemy and the auditors muddled up in my mind. I’m terrified of both of them, but the auditors know where I live.”

— K.J. Parker

47. “I don’t believe in gods, only in religion.”

— K.J. Parker

48. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? “That’s like saying the cat’s cat is a dog.”

— K.J. Parker

49. “It’d have been so nice if my life had been a well-controlled experiment. You know; start off with your basic ingredients, add education, experiences, events, stirring with a glass rod, when appropriate retarding the reaction with a block of ice. Predictable consequences, intended results, and something worth having at the end. Hasn’t quite worked out like that. As for the result, the product, we’ll have to wait and see. I may yet surprise myself.”

— K.J. Parker

50. “Libraries are the granary of the spirit, without which we could not survive the siege.”

— K.J. Parker