Top 100 Richard K. Morgan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough.”

— Richard K. Morgan

2. “If they asked how I died tell them: Still angry.”

— Richard K. Morgan

3. “The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

— Richard K. Morgan

4. “For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict – because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.”

— Richard K. Morgan

5. “The way I see it, anyone who’s proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn’t read enough history yet.”

— Richard K. Morgan

6. “It is not our enemies that defeat us. It is our fear. Do not be afraid of the monsters, Miss Elizabeth. Make them afraid of you.”

— Richard K. Morgan

7. “Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.”

— Richard K. Morgan

8. “We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?”

— Richard K. Morgan

9. “I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that’s humanly true.”

— Richard K. Morgan

10. “Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it.”

— Richard K. Morgan

11. “Worse fates than being forced into a place where your choice of acts is limited to those where your soul burns brightest.”

— Richard K. Morgan

12. “You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves.”

— Richard K. Morgan

13. “A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.”

— Richard K. Morgan

14. “Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead.”

— Richard K. Morgan

15. “It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.”

— Richard K. Morgan

16. “Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.”

— Richard K. Morgan

17. “Syndicate is technically the first game I worked on.”

— Richard K. Morgan

18. “Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you’re telling.”

— Richard K. Morgan

19. “In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.”

— Richard K. Morgan

20. “There are no alternatives. You live with what is. And you don’t let your ghosts rent room in your head.”

— Richard K. Morgan

21. “Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile. Travel abroad and learn to live in other cultures. That’s one of the things about teaching abroad.”

— Richard K. Morgan

22. “Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.”

— Richard K. Morgan

23. “I’ve been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.”

— Richard K. Morgan

24. “When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he’s ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.”

— Richard K. Morgan

25. “I think certainly if I’d started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn’t know anything much about the world. I hadn’t had any direct experience of how the world works.”

— Richard K. Morgan

26. “Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.”

— Richard K. Morgan

27. “Get to the next screen.”

— Richard K. Morgan

28. “You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t really matter anymore. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.”

— Richard K. Morgan

29. “Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you’re no longer a soldier. You’re just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.”

— Richard K. Morgan

30. “There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”

— Richard K. Morgan

31. “People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.’ This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds and I’ve never considered myself a successful man.”

— Richard K. Morgan

32. “Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”

— Richard K. Morgan

33. “When they ask how I died,” I said. “Tell them: Still Angry.”

— Richard K. Morgan

34. “In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.”

— Richard K. Morgan

35. “The human eye is a wonderful device,” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

— Richard K. Morgan

36. “Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one.”

— Richard K. Morgan

37. “It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon.”

— Richard K. Morgan

38. “Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.”

— Richard K. Morgan

39. “Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There’s this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn’t quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like.”

— Richard K. Morgan

40. “You don’t trust me?’ ‘Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.”

— Richard K. Morgan

41. “They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant laborer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered-carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his somber dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.”

— Richard K. Morgan

42. “What others believe is not my concern, unless they attempt to force it on me.”

— Richard K. Morgan

43. “I am home, you soggy-faced, entitled little prick, he barely stopped himself saying. You think it took northern sorcery to make me the way I am now? You think it took a war? Those things were tonic compared to what came before. Desperation and deception were waiting for me at the nursery door, took me by either hand as I walked out into my youth, have been my constant companions since.”

— Richard K. Morgan

44. “Anyone who builds satellites we can’t shoot down needs to be taken seriously and, if they ever come back for their hardware, be approached with caution. That’s not religion, it’s common sense. Quellcrist Falconer Metaphysics for Revolutionaries.”

— Richard K. Morgan

45. “No way. You won’t catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you.”

— Richard K. Morgan

46. “Ringil lifted his right hand as if it pained him, put it slowly and wonderingly up to his shoulder and touched the pommel of his sword like, well, like he was caressing someone’s prick, to be honest.”

— Richard K. Morgan

47. “We’re more than what we do.”

— Richard K. Morgan

48. “In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay. QUELLCRIST.”

— Richard K. Morgan

49. “According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.”

— Richard K. Morgan

50. “Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.”

— Richard K. Morgan