Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “But I am no Gold. I am a Red.”

— Pierce Brown

252. “This race – what a beautiful monster. They carry all of humanity’s strengths, except one. Empathy.”

— Pierce Brown

253. “Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read.” Romulus thumps his chest. “Honor is what you do.”

— Pierce Brown

254. “She will not come back, but her beauty, her voice, will echo until the end of time. She believed in something beyond herself, and her death gave her voice power it didn’t have in life.”

— Pierce Brown

255. “If you punch me back, you will be sent home, Pixie.” I kick him in the shin.”

— Pierce Brown

256. “But even as I yearn for it, I fear it. Because the more I see of this cruel world, the less I believe it ends in some pleasant fiction.”

— Pierce Brown

257. “My test comes after two months of training my mind with Dancer. I do not memorize. I do not even really learn when with him. Instead, his training is designed to help my mind adapt to paradigm shifts. For instance, if a fish has 3,453 scales on its left side and 3,453 on its right side, which side of the fish has the most scales? The outside. They call it extrapolational thinking. It was how I knew that I should eat the scythe card when I first met Dancer. I am very good at it.”

— Pierce Brown

258. “You make one tribe out of twelve,” I finally say. “By taking slaves.” Just like the Society. Build on the backs of others. It isn’t cruel. It is practical. Fitchner claps mockingly. “Prime, Reaper. Prime. Looks like someone is bucking for Primus.”

— Pierce Brown

259. “Stories are the wealth of humanity!”

— Pierce Brown

260. “One cannot make a mouse a lion.” “He can think like a lion.”

— Pierce Brown

261. “I can’t hate him any more than I can hate myself. Maybe that isn’t forgiveness, but it’s all I have to give.”

— Pierce Brown

262. “He has to play my game!” Sevro says. “Shithead isn’t getting out till he plays nice. I’ll give him a riddle instead. What do I have in my pocket?”

— Pierce Brown

263. “He looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again.”

— Pierce Brown

264. “You’re the bloodydamn messiah the Reds have been waiting for their entire lives.”

— Pierce Brown

265. “I speak the midLingo. It’s more comfortable than that highLingo fartdust Priam jabbers on in.”

— Pierce Brown

266. “Per aspera ad astra.” “Through the thorns to the stars.” Sevro snickers. “You fancy little fart. Omnis vir lupus.” Everyone a wolf.”

— Pierce Brown

267. “He tells us how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names.”

— Pierce Brown

268. “I used to think the life strands of my friends frayed around me, because mine was too strong. Now I realize that when we are wound together, we make something unbreakable. Something that lasts long after this life ends. My.”

— Pierce Brown

269. “They are terrible. Terribly rich. Terribly talented. And their chief virtue lies in their ability to sin. They’re prodigies at it.”

— Pierce Brown

270. “Government is never the solution, but it is almost always the problem.”

— Pierce Brown

271. “My heart can’t stay here in this cage she herself fled. It must move on.”

— Pierce Brown

272. “Absent love, fear will do nicely in a pinch.”

— Pierce Brown

273. “That’s how Sevro is. Betray him and you’re purged from existence.”

— Pierce Brown

274. “I put him and Victra in the west wing so we can actually get some sleep. Last time, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking a coyote was caught in the air recycler. I swear, at the pace they’re going they’ll be able to single-handedly populate Pluto in a few years.”

— Pierce Brown

275. “Bye, Felicia.” Victra spits, turning to the last Praetorian.”

— Pierce Brown

276. “The world is soundless. We cannot hear, but a pack of wolves does not need words to know that it is time to hunt.”

— Pierce Brown

277. “The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter.”

— Pierce Brown

278. “Anything gentle that lives long, hides its stinger well.”

— Pierce Brown

279. “The hangover of regret comes hard and fast. The anger floods out. It wasn’t just memories Z protected me from. It was always myself. Always the overcompensating pride of a street dog who can’t bear to be laughed at, so he buys nice suits, drains his account on fashionable flats, yaps at monsters, gambles with people who can afford to lose.”

— Pierce Brown

280. “And I order you to get drunk!” I roar to my army. They look at me like I am mad. “Get drunk?” one says. “Yes!” I cut him off before he can say more. “Can you manage that? Act like fools, for once?” “We’ll try,” Milia cries. “Won’t we?”

— Pierce Brown

281. “Tradition is the crown of the tyrant.”

— Pierce Brown

282. “You taught me once, Lorn. I’m a better man for it. But now it’s my turn to teach you. Men can change. Sometimes they have to fall. Sometimes they have to leap.”

— Pierce Brown

283. “To win, I’ll need an army, but it cannot be made of slaves. Not again. I now need, as I’ll need at the head of a rebellion, followers, not slaves. Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it. A.”

— Pierce Brown

284. “Hang a man for no real reason and you might get some grumblings from the townships. But force sobriety upon us, and you’ll be picking up the pieces for a bloodydamn month.”

— Pierce Brown

285. “This is always how the story would end,” he says to me. “Not with your screams. Not with your rage. But with your silence.”

— Pierce Brown

286. “I said it once. Now I’ll say it twice. If there’s two things in this world that can’t be killed, it’s the fungus under my sack and the Reaper of bloodydamn Mars. Haha!”

— Pierce Brown

287. “Truth can be cruel. Yet it is the only thing of value.”

— Pierce Brown

288. “You’re my friend,” he says, voice heavy with emotion. “You will always be my friend. I won’t put a dagger in your back. But I will stand up to you. I will do what is right.”

— Pierce Brown

289. “Oy, boyo, you look like you slithered out of a skeleton’s rickety cooch.”

— Pierce Brown

290. “The die is cast.”

— Pierce Brown

291. “You want respect? Earn it.”

— Pierce Brown

292. “Forevermore, let justice be done.”

— Pierce Brown

293. “I admire one to my left, the bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment – one I know I shall never forget – so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again.”

— Pierce Brown

294. “I took his hand, he took a friend. All he has done is bite and claw for his own survival. Watching him now, so small and plain in a world of gods, it’s almost as if he’s the hero nobly struggling against a father who rejected him, against a Society that laughs at his size, his weakness, and scorns him as a cannibal even though it was they who told him to do whatever he had to do to win.”

— Pierce Brown

295. “It’s rage and fear leaving our bodies. Though space drags us across the floor to its embrace. Though death might come for us. I am home in this weird screaming mass of humanity. And as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”

— Pierce Brown

296. “Because hope is an opiate, not a plan.”

— Pierce Brown

297. “Seeing the end coming doesn’t mean you can dodge it, fix it, stop it. We.”

— Pierce Brown

298. “My heart was my brother. And I no longer believe in a world that says he was too weak to deserve life.”

— Pierce Brown

299. “The waves crash all around the roots of the building. Both were made by man. Perhaps at first in hope, to give our species a new home to live and to love. But in time, I don’t know when, their creation became a vanity of will, and in the shadow of that vanity, man grew lesser for having more. Lesser for mastering the keys of creation, because he mistook himself for god, and cared less for his people, and more that his works endured.”

— Pierce Brown

300. “The Gray soldiers prowl the cities ensuring order, ensuring obedience to the hierarchy. The Whites arbitrate their justice and push their philosophy. Pinks pleasure and serve in highColor homes. Silvers count and manipulate currency and logistics. Yellows study the medicines and sciences. Greens develop technology. Blues navigate the stars. Coppers run the beauracracy. Every Color has a purpose. Every Color props up the Golds.”

— Pierce Brown