Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Death isn’t empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom... Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, fear of death. I say we break those chains.”

— Pierce Brown

352. “Go on. What about her? Come on, man. You killed my brothers. I killed Fitchner. It’s already awkward.”

— Pierce Brown

353. “Dreamers die bad.”

— Pierce Brown

354. “I told myself I would be better than this. I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility.”

— Pierce Brown

355. “An Imperator commands each fleet; a Praetor commands squadrons within that fleet.”

— Pierce Brown

356. “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

357. “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

358. “How can we promise freedom and then be the arbiter of a people’s choices? That is not freedom. That is social engineering. That is the long road to tyranny.”

— Pierce Brown

359. “It takes more to hope than to remember.”

— Pierce Brown

360. “It is my duty as a free man to read so I’m not blind being lead around by my nose.”

— Pierce Brown

361. “Go on.” I sip the coffee. “This is whiskey.”

— Pierce Brown

362. “I howl for my wife, for my father. For Ragnar and Quinn and Pax and Narol. For all the people I’ve lost. For all they would take. I howl because I am a Helldiver of Lykos. I am the Reaper of Mars. And I have paid for access to this bunker with my flesh, all so that I might either die with my friends or see our enemies brought to justice.”

— Pierce Brown

363. “Slaves do not have the bravery of free men. That is why Golds lie to lowReds and make them think they are brave. That is why they lie to Obsidians and make them think it is an honor to serve gods. Easier than the truth. Yet it takes only one truth to bring a kingdom of lies crashing down. Ragnar.”

— Pierce Brown

364. “The tide has risen. And I feel a deep terror in wondering exactly what it will wash away.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

366. “But the single brain’s control is limited. Imagine each one of the fingers had a brain of its own that interacted with the main brain. The fingers obey, but they function independently. What could the hand do then? What could an army do? I twirl the stick along my fingers in intricate patterns. Exactly.”

— Pierce Brown

367. “I wish I knew that the eyes of his spirit looked upon his Vale. That his ancestors were waiting for him in their cool highland valley. But I know it is not so, because I know the Vale was created and cultivated by the Board of Quality Control in order to provide an important sociological prerequisite for obedience: a carrot at the end of a hard life. That very same belief that made them able to endure untold hardship in the mines has become a militant faith.”

— Pierce Brown

368. “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

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

— Pierce Brown

370. “Fitchner scratches his groin with his razor’s hilt. His manners are worse than mine.”

— Pierce Brown

371. “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

372. “He was never the brightest, not in the way they wanted. Oh, he was kind and bright with emotions – he could sense sadness or anger a klick away. But empathy is a lowColor thing.”

— Pierce Brown

373. “One must worry about the strength of a principle when it must compromise itself so often to survive.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

375. “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

376. “Everything he says is perfectly innocuous. Yet I hate him. It’s like he doesn’t think me a human; instead I’m just a chess piece and he’s waiting to move me around. No. Shove me around. He somehow forgot to be seventeen or eighteen like the rest. He is a man.”

— Pierce Brown

377. “My heart breaks for who you were,” he says. “For that boy who watched his wife die. My heart broke in that garden. It breaks now knowing all you suffered.”

— Pierce Brown

378. “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

379. “Will you accept these stains, godchild?”

— Pierce Brown

380. “In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked.”

— Pierce Brown

381. “There is no morality to him. No goodness. No evil intent when he killed Eo. He believes he is beyond morality. His aspirations are so grand that he has become inhuman in his desperate desire to preserve humanity.”

— Pierce Brown

382. “Tell the hag we’re here for war. Not words.”

— Pierce Brown

383. “Any fool can stick a blade into another’s belly. The school’s role is to find the leaders of men, not the killers of men. So the point, you silly little children, is not to kill, but to conquer.”

— Pierce Brown

384. “It fills me with a strange emptiness knowing that I was enough for her when I was never enough for Eo.”

— Pierce Brown

385. “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

386. “He is the monster they don’t know how to write stories about. You cannot trust him.” The.”

— Pierce Brown

387. “Tidings! It’s Uncle Sevro and the Moderately Friendly Giant.”

— Pierce Brown

388. “In his eyes I glimpse the loneliness, the longing for a life that should have been, and the glimmer of the man he wants to be underneath the man he thinks he has to be.”

— Pierce Brown

389. “We must save ourselves from ourselves before the inheritance of humanity is ash.”

— Pierce Brown

390. “Life is the most effective school ever created.”

— Pierce Brown

391. “I panic as suicides do when they realize their folly.”

— Pierce Brown

392. “As her voice finally swells and the song runs out of words, I know I have lost her. She becomes something more important; and she was right, I do not understand.”

— Pierce Brown

393. “Anything that believes only in itself cannot go happily into the night.”

— Pierce Brown

394. “Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence.”

— Pierce Brown

395. “I’m all that’s left of that family that could have been. A dark shadow of the man I was meant to be.”

— Pierce Brown

396. “What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.”

— Pierce Brown

397. “I cannot be afraid. I’ve spent too long being afraid. Too long being diminished by loss. Too long being everything except what I need to be. And whether I am the Reaper, or whether it’s just another mask, it’s one I must wear, not just for them, but for myself.”

— Pierce Brown

398. “It’s a lonely thing carrying the body of someone dead and loved. Like a vase you know will never again hold flowers. I.”

— Pierce Brown

399. “Your firstborn son, Claudius, was all a man could hope for – a son better and wiser than his father.”

— Pierce Brown

400. “So the answer is autonomy,” I say. “Maybe.” She bites her lip. Later that night, she elaborates. “It’s like a hand.”

— Pierce Brown