Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.”

— Pierce Brown

452. “You are the wolf that howls and bites. i am the mustang that nuzzles the hand People know they can work with me. With you? Hell, kill or be killed.”

— Pierce Brown

453. “So, you’re who they call the Reaper,” Tactus drawls. He swings my blade experimentally. “Well, you just look too pretty to be much damage at all.” “Is he flirting with me?” I ask the Tamara girl. “Tactus, go away! Thank you, but now go away,” says the thin, hawkish girl.”

— Pierce Brown

454. “Even stranger, I desperately want him to like me. Why? I think it is because I feel as though he is the only one, including Roque and Cassius, who understands life. He is ugly in a world where he should be beautiful, and because of his deficiencies, he was chosen to die. He, in many ways, is no better than a Red.”

— Pierce Brown

455. “Slow power can grind away any stagnant enemy. But fast power, one that can travel where you go, do what you wish it to as effectively as a hammer hitting a nail, that is the power that lops off heads and steals crowns. Can I trust you with it?”

— Pierce Brown

456. “You will fall to ruin because you believe that exceptions to the rule make new rules.”

— Pierce Brown

457. “But history is so often molded from tainted clay by those who remain.”

— Pierce Brown

458. “They only learn of their folly when they hear the medBots descending behind them to carry her broken body up to Olympus. She never returns. Still the Proctors do not interfere. I’m not sure why they even exist.”

— Pierce Brown

459. “He put his ear to Pax’s chest to listen to his heartbeat. He told me then what he felt when he declared this war within the Hives of Phobos. How he was not close enough to hear the fading beat of his father’s heart, or Eo’s. But how, in that moment, he could feel the hearts of his people beating across the darkness. How in the heartbeat of our son he could hear them all again.”

— Pierce Brown

460. “Roque always did dress up a place. Unfortunately he’s got the taste of a ninety-year-old orchestra first chair.”

— Pierce Brown

461. “After a while of watching me, he stands and punches me in the face. “If you punch me back, you will be sent home, Pixie.” I kick him in the shin. He limps away, laughing like a drunk Uncle Narol. I’m not sent home.”

— Pierce Brown

462. “Others will have lost friends, and so the House will devour itself. The Society did this on purpose; they want chaos. It will be our second test. Tribal strife.”

— Pierce Brown

463. “Dreamers die bad.”

— Pierce Brown

464. “So I decide to overshoot his estimation of my insanity and show him how little he really understands the psychology of Reds. Today I lead the Pax on a suicide mission into the heart of his fleet.”

— Pierce Brown

465. “My body welcomes the adrenaline, sucking it down like water on cracked asphalt. I look at the watch and feel nothing. My focus narrows to the here and now. I grin.”

— Pierce Brown

466. “Personally, I do not want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die. No, I’ve always wished to make a god.”

— Pierce Brown

467. “And with a great pull, I rip out the tongue of the Jackal.”

— Pierce Brown

468. “Whisper her name.” I do and the Pegasus unfurls like a haemanthus bud. He sets a petal in the center. It closes again. “This is your heart. Guard it with iron.”

— Pierce Brown

469. “A pastiche of eyes. But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.”

— Pierce Brown

470. “Come ask for one when you’re Scarred, little prince.” She looks over her shoulder. “Until then, I would advise you and the reaper to run.”

— Pierce Brown

471. “It’s there, even if you never see it till the end – that spark of individuality, of freedom.”

— Pierce Brown

472. “The world beyond is vast, but so small. Men putting themselves in boxes. Sitting at desks. Riding in cars. Ships. Here, the world is small, but without end.”

— Pierce Brown

473. “There will dawn a day when these hostile hours, these days of hatred and violence, seem the faintest of memories, but dark and steep and long is the road up out of hell. So do not tire, do not despair, do not abandon your brethren, and do not forget that through this darkness we and we alone carry the light of freedom. We must defend it with every cell in our bodies. If not now, when? If not us, who?”

— Pierce Brown

474. “It is to remember how few people you know. How many do not know you. How many will soon forget you. How many praise you today to offer contempt tomorrow. Permanence of fame, power, dominion of the individual, are illusions. All that will be measured, all that will last, is your mastery of yourself.”

— Pierce Brown

475. “The deeper we go, the fewer the lights, the dirtier the buildings, the stranger the animals, but the more brilliant the graffiti.”

— Pierce Brown

476. “All my life, I’ve tamed myself to not frighten others. Sometimes it is fun to let the lion out.”

— Pierce Brown

477. “The Jackal is pinned, bleeding, and surrounded by my army. His ambush undone. He has lost, but he is not helpless. He is no longer Lucian. It’s almost like his hand isn’t impaled. His voice doesn’t waver. He is not angry, just pissinyourboots scary. He reminds me of me before I go into a rage. Quiet. Unhurried. I wanted my soldiers to see him squirm. He doesn’t, so I tell them to leave.”

— Pierce Brown

478. “Sometimes, little one, it’s best if the worlds think you a little mad.”

— Pierce Brown

479. “But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science – how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here.”

— Pierce Brown

480. “I rise into darkness, away from the garden they watered with the blood of my friends.”

— Pierce Brown

481. “Five hundred years.” I shake my head. “This is our bloodydamn planet.” “Through sweat and toil it was made so,” he agrees. “Then what will it take to take it back?” “Blood.” Dancer smiles at me like a township alleycat. There’s a beast behind this man’s fatherly smiles. Eo was right. It comes to violence.”

— Pierce Brown

482. “I am so small. A billion tons of durosteel and nanometal move through the heavens, and I have never been beyond Mars’s atmosphere. They are like specks of silver in an ocean of ink. And I am so much less. But those specs could ravage Mars. They could destroy a moon. Those specks rule the ink.”

— Pierce Brown

483. “In the end, I reach the goblet, but only after killing an annoying wizard and cruelly enslaving the race of elves by means ofo said wizard’s magic wand. I could have left the elves be. But they annoyed me.”

— Pierce Brown

484. “They see my slender hands and naked face and believe me weak. Dangerous game, judging a blade by its scabbard.”

— Pierce Brown

485. “What good is being smarter than everyone if no one listens? Is this how my father felt? My brother? Is evil born of pure frustration?”

— Pierce Brown

486. “We all have nature and nurture to shape us. She can watch other people’s opinions when she has opinions of her own, and no sooner. We’re not digital creatures. We’re flesh and blood. Better she learns that before the world finds her.”

— Pierce Brown

487. “Tactus claps his hands together in laughter and draws Sevro in for an obnoxious hug. They are two very peculiar people. But I suppose snuggling in horse corpses gives a bond – makes twins of a morbid sort.”

— Pierce Brown

488. “And what you do for the people you love cannot be judged.”

— Pierce Brown

489. “He’s not a man made for affection. His face is pale and ghostly. Thirty-five and so old, so tired. A scar twists his upper lip. Gray streaks his thick hair.”

— Pierce Brown

490. “Men and women sit penitent over their little displays, watching their little programs, forgetting where they are in favor of where they’d wish to be.”

— Pierce Brown

491. “That’s what Society does – spread the blame so there is no villain, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery. Processes. And it rumbles on, inexorable till a whole generation rises that will throw themselves on the gears.”

— Pierce Brown

492. “Silly Poet. Haven’t you wondered where Sevro is?”

— Pierce Brown

493. “He doesn’t have a knife or a bat. No, he has something I’m far more interested in. A question mark of a sword. A slingBlade for reaping grain.”

— Pierce Brown

494. “Our age is ending. I feel the days shortening. The brief light dimming upon the kingdom of man.”

— Pierce Brown

495. “But you must never let your mind sleep. Your Mind’s Eye must rove without rest. Even as you speak, eat, move, it is not enough for it to collect data, it must digest it as a subfunction, or you will miss something and become a slave to another.”

— Pierce Brown

496. “Protect the ArchGovernor!” Mustang shouts at me, voice more composed than my own, making me feel an idiot obsessed with chivalry. Of course she does not need me to save her.”

— Pierce Brown

497. “THE REAPER Silent, he lies encased in mankilling metal in the belly of a starship called the Morning Star.”

— Pierce Brown

498. “I want to believe his sense of justice is equal to my love for him, but these are deep waters, and I know friends can lie just as well as enemies.”

— Pierce Brown

499. “I said I would give you justice. Vengeance is an empty thing, Darrow.”

— Pierce Brown

500. “It is a humbling thing knowing someone cannot live without you, knowing that though they’ve betrayed you, they wish for nothing but absolution.”

— Pierce Brown