Top 500 Pierce Brown Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I’ve spend enough time in the past, love. The dead need no tears. They don’t rest easier for our vengeance, or our guilt. They’d want us to live. And life’s about the now and the future, eh?”

— Pierce Brown

402. “I am ready for the enemy to come. I have more reasons to fight then they do. My armor is my love.”

— Pierce Brown

403. “A man thinks he can fly, but he is afraid to jump. A poor friend pushes him from behind.” He looks up at me. “A good friend jumps with.”

— Pierce Brown

404. “My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough.”

— Pierce Brown

405. “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

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

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

408. “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

409. “I knew war was dreadful, but I did not expect to fear it. How can anyone not, when death is just a blind giant with scissors?”

— Pierce Brown

410. “He is like any other petty tyrant of history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness.”

— Pierce Brown

411. “Farmers make culture. Nomads make war.”

— Pierce Brown

412. “The others say you are like a machine, because they think you know no fear. They’re blind. They don’t see how fear binds you.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

414. “You are a sociopath, Adrius. You don’t only do what you need to do. You wear whatever face you need, whatever emotion you desire like a glove.”

— Pierce Brown

415. “Eyes belonging to some creature beyond man – a distant, callous calculation fueled by monstrous, inhuman pride. A pride that goes beyond him and stretches back to man’s first feeble steps into black space. It is the pride of a dozen generations of fathers and grandfathers and sisters and brothers, all distilled now into a single brilliant, perfect vessel that bears no failure, abides no flaws.”

— Pierce Brown

416. “The kid seems pulled straight from the Lykos crop, Beta maybe. He’s like an ugly, tiny, irritable Loran. Julian doesn’t know what to do, so he makes a challenge.”

— Pierce Brown

417. “How did he convince you not to make him a slave, Darrow?”

— Pierce Brown

418. “Gory hell, this is miserable,” Dax, Milia’s companion, mutters. I can’t see him in our snow tunnel. Mustang nudges me. We can just barely see Tactus curled into the hollow of Pax’s armpit. The two men snuggle together and wake like lovers, only to flinch away from one another when their ice-crusted eyelids flutter open. “Wonder which is Romeo,” Mustang whispers, her throat raspy. I.”

— Pierce Brown

419. “They have us here because this valley was humanity before Gold ruled. Fractured. Disunited even in our very own tribe. They want us to go through the process that our forefathers went through. Step by step, this game will evolve to teach us new lessons. Hierarchies within the game will develop. We’ll have Reds, Golds, Coppers.”

— Pierce Brown

420. “Half the clans are already drunk when we arrive in the Common. In addition to a dancing people, we’re a drunken people. The Tinpots let us alone in that. 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

421. “Brother,” he says. “I knew you would come back. I knew it in my heart. This place was hollow without you.” He grins at me with such pride. “How you now fill it.”

— Pierce Brown

422. “We achieve perfection first by acknowledging our failures. We increase understanding first by recognizing our ignorance.”

— Pierce Brown

423. “There’s never a right call, just people who make the hard ones.”

— Pierce Brown

424. “I find myself proud of them as I laugh with the mad shaman, because in all this stupid, greedy world, the spirit comes alive when you see someone say, no more.”

— Pierce Brown

425. “He is like any other petty tyrant of history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness. He is the Society – a monster dripping in decadence, yet seeing none of his own hypocrisy. He views all this wealth, all this power, as his right. He is deluded. They all are. But I cannot cut him down from the front. No, no matter how well I fight. He is too strong.”

— Pierce Brown

426. “The greatest weapon a rebellion has is its spiritus. The spirit of change. That little seed that finds a hope in the mind and flourishes and spreads.”

— Pierce Brown

427. “Eo said people would always look to me. She believed I had some quality, some essence that gave hope. I rarely feel it in myself.”

— Pierce Brown

428. “The only crime is if we lose.”

— Pierce Brown

429. “You are not wicked. You are not cruel. And what you do for the people you love cannot be judged.”

— Pierce Brown

430. “We aren’t negotiating.” “Humans are always negotiating. That’s what conversation is.”

— Pierce Brown

431. “It’s like they suddenly don’t understand what it is they have created. I touch the haemanthus blossom in my pocket and feel the wedding band around my neck. They didn’t create me. She did. It.”

— Pierce Brown

432. “Of course. Of course. Mercury thinks you brilliant. Apollo thinks you’re uppity. He really does not like you, you know.”

— Pierce Brown

433. “These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. 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. The.”

— Pierce Brown

434. “I want Minerva off my back so I can come here and beat you, sure.” And then win the stupid game and destroy your civilization, please.”

— Pierce Brown

435. “The Institute is with us for the rest of our lives. If we lose, we may never gain position, ever.”

— Pierce Brown

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

— Pierce Brown

437. “Lorn once told me if he had been my father he would have raised me to be a good man. ‘There’s no peace for great men,’ he said.” I smile at the memory. “I should have asked him who he thinks makes the peace for all those good men.”

— Pierce Brown

438. “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

439. “Tactus has assumed command in my absence. The man is a cruel beast, but he’s my cruel beast.”

— Pierce Brown

440. “A los que cenan con la guerra y el imperio, siempre les llega la cuenta al final.”

— Pierce Brown

441. “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

442. “I know death well enough to hear it gather its breath.”

— Pierce Brown

443. “Cassius lets his helmet retract and winks at me. His face is harder than when we first met. But every now and again there’s that twinkle in his eyes, like a light inside a far-off tent, making you feel warm even though you’re still outside. And I am outside. He thinks I don’t see how wounded he is. How I’m a replacement for the brother Darrow of Lykos took from him in the Institute. Sometimes he looks at me and I know he sees Julian. A small, selfish part of me wishes he just saw me.”

— Pierce Brown

444. “Now look around,” I say quietly. “There are no Golds here. I’m a Red. You’re a Red. We are all Reds till one of us gets enough power. Then we get rights. Then we make our own law.” I lean back and raise my voice. “That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren’t given. They are made by the strong.”

— Pierce Brown

445. “I’ve never killed men with so little regard. And it frightens me how easy I find it in war. There is no ambiguity here, no violation of moral creed. These people are warColors. They kill me or I kill them. It’s simpler than the Passage.”

— Pierce Brown

446. “Mother bid me to tell you: a pauper can never be a prince. Every time you look in the mirror, remember what we did to you. Remember you breathe because we let you. Remember your heart will one day be on our table. Rise so high, in mud you lie.”

— Pierce Brown

447. “Strange the efforts these people go to in order to make themselves feel part of history and not a piece of the future.”

— Pierce Brown

448. “If they are monsters, we should ask ourselves who made them that way.”

— Pierce Brown

449. “What do you suppose they would think of us?” I ask. “Of man?” “I suppose they would think we’re beautiful, strange, and inexplicably horrible to one another.”

— Pierce Brown

450. “The pain makes my thoughts of Eo seem like silly things. It gives false perspective. I want to like the pain, but I can only handle so much. The mixture of water and blood pools at my pale feet. The thought of Eo’s feet dangling makes me fall sobbing to the floor. I push my back into the side of the shower till the pain stops my thinking and I bite my tongue bloody. I’m not as tough as I thought I was. No Helldiver really is. No man really is.”

— Pierce Brown