Top 60 Karen Traviss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.”

— Karen Traviss

2. “Long memory, short fuse, big revenge.”

— Karen Traviss

3. “If we don’t stand up for others, who will be left to stand up for us?”

— Karen Traviss

4. “Armor does not make a Mandalorian. The armor is simply a manifestation of an impenetrable, unassailable heart.”

— Karen Traviss

5. “So you want a knife, a nice sharp knife. You hone that blade to its limits. It even cuts through stone when you want it to. It saves your life. And then you’re outraged when it cuts you accidentally. You see, knives don’t switch off. And neither do people, not when you hone them to a fine edge.”

— Karen Traviss

6. “Life was a trade-off between loneliness and inevitable peaks of joy or agony.”

— Karen Traviss

7. “Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories.”

— Karen Traviss

8. “It was an ethical choice between rules or lives, and rules didn’t always translate into what was right.”

— Karen Traviss

9. “We’re all going to die sometime, so you might as well die pushing the odds for something that matters.”

— Karen Traviss

10. “Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action.”

— Karen Traviss

11. “You never have perfect knowledge in combat, gentlemen. It’s what we call the fog of war. You can either sit around worrying what’s real and what’s not, or you can realize the enemy hasn’t got a clue either and fire off a few rounds of psychology. A truly great army is one that only has to rattle its saber to win a war.”

— Karen Traviss

12. “Writing is like a rollercoaster ride for me, an adventure. I love exploring the world through playing people who are absolutely nothing like me.”

— Karen Traviss

13. “A military life attracts young people for many reasons – duty, comradeship, purpose, the opportunity to test life to the limits, to learn a trade, escape from home, adventure – even patriotism.”

— Karen Traviss

14. “Bury me the ONI way. Fill me up with explosives and use me as a booby trap.”

— Karen Traviss

15. “Think of yourselves as a hand. Each of you is a finger, and without the others you’re useless. Alone, a finger can’t grasp, or control, or form a fist. You are nothing on your own, and everything together.”

— Karen Traviss

16. “I love being pushed out of my comfort zone.”

— Karen Traviss

17. “Dom decided that when life returned to normal – even after fourteen years, he had to think that it could – he’d follow Cole’s example and treat money as easy come, easy go. People were what mattered. You couldn’t replace them, and they didn’t earn interest. They just slipped away a day at a time, and you had to make the most of every precious moment.”

— Karen Traviss

18. “Sitting back and not getting involved while people get killed in an endless cycle of wars doesn’t count as not having blood on your hands.”

— Karen Traviss

19. “If you’re not prepared to do something in public, don’t do it at all.”

— Karen Traviss

20. “That’s how tyranny succeeds. When folks think it won’t affect them until eventually it does.”

— Karen Traviss

21. “I’ve never met a soldier who knew he was a hero. It’s not false modesty. They simply decide to do something that they know they must do, usually for there comrades, because if they don’t, those people will suffer in some way. For them, that compulsion is far stronger than any fear. The fact we find it exceptional is a sad indictment of the human race. I’d like to live in a world of heroes. If we did, there would be no wars.”

— Karen Traviss

22. “Gra’tua cuun hett su dralshy’a.”

— Karen Traviss

23. “If you take a shot at someone, you keep firing until they can no longer return fire. Wound them, and you have an angry enemy who knows your position.”

— Karen Traviss

24. “It’s hard to send someone to their death,” she said, answering his silent question. His expression was hidden behind the visor of his helmet. She didn’t need to call on any of her abilities as a Jedi to know what he was thinking: one day she would do the same to men like him. The realization caught her unawares. “You’ll get used to it,” he said. She doubted it.”

— Karen Traviss

25. “I don’t know who the good guys are anymore. But I do know what the enemy is. It’s the compromise of principles. You lose the war when you lose your principles. And the first principle is to look out for your comrades.”

— Karen Traviss

26. “They said the world was divided into those folks who ran away from danger, and those who ran toward it.”

— Karen Traviss

27. “As a writer, I have a moral deal with you, the reader – if I hook you with a story, my part of the deal is to follow through and give you a satisfying outcome.”

— Karen Traviss

28. “It was as if the small differences mattered more than the really big ones – like you had to recognize something before you could hate it properly. No.”

— Karen Traviss

29. “Regular people said they couldn’t tell the difference between one clone and another, did they? That was what came of spending too much time looking at faces and not enough wondering what shaped people and went on inside their heads.”

— Karen Traviss

30. “Humans believed they thought things consciously when most of the time they were simply rationalizing instinctive reactions as basic as the amoeba’s, and after those reactions had already taken place.”

— Karen Traviss

31. “I don’t mind being shot at. It’s having a government that lies to me that I hate.”

— Karen Traviss

32. “Let’s revise the old adage for our times. All that it requires for evil to succeed is that enough lazy, stupid bastards believe everything they’re told.”

— Karen Traviss

33. “Somehow, though, they managed to ignore the fact that being the dominant species on Earth meant that absolutely nothing about their position was inevitable or beyond their control.”

— Karen Traviss

34. “In this job, you handpick your people. You need the best. You need the most loyal. You need the most ruthless.”

— Karen Traviss

35. “I refuse to believe that gods want to make mortals unhappy and torment them. That’s what humans do. And humans are very definitely not divine.”

— Karen Traviss

36. “Revenge might give you a warm feeling, but unless it delivers some lasting results you might as well have a nice cup of mocha instead.”

— Karen Traviss

37. “My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. Im drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution.”

— Karen Traviss

38. “Family took a lot more than genes to hold it together.”

— Karen Traviss

39. “And the maximum number extracted. You know what your bosses say about attachment, littl’un. Don’t get too attached to me.”

— Karen Traviss

40. “Why doesn’t the fact that I’m human matter to human beings.”

— Karen Traviss

41. “And nobody has the right to judge a soldier from the warmth and safety of their armchair.”

— Karen Traviss

42. “It crossed her mind that she might be saving clone soldiers from death by biological agent so they could die from blaster and cannon round. It was a horrible thought.”

— Karen Traviss

43. “Covering his tracks by randomizing his route back to the apartment had become routine for Skirata now, which was a bizarre irony in itself.”

— Karen Traviss

44. “There is a fine line between neutral and amoral. In fact, there may be no line there at all.”

— Karen Traviss

45. “We weren’t the miscreants he was looking for. Something like that.”

— Karen Traviss

46. “Success is everyone’s child. Failure is an orphan.” Omas smiled ruefully.”

— Karen Traviss

47. “And he explained that there was no Mandalorian word for “hero.” It was only not being one that had its own word: Hut’uun.”

— Karen Traviss

48. “When you can no longer know what your nation or your government stands for, or even where it is, you need a set of beliefs you can carry with you and cling to. You need a core in your heart that will never change.”

— Karen Traviss

49. “Darman was expert at his craft, too, but there was a sense of hard-won skill, and there was no randomness or mystery to that. She liked him for being so pragmatic. It crossed her mind that she might be saving clone soldiers from death by biological agent so they could die from blaster and cannon round. It was a horrible thought.”

— Karen Traviss

50. “Before you handed someone power, you had to ask yourself if you’d be happy with the worst possible thing they could ever do with it.”

— Karen Traviss