Top 100 Richard K. Morgan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, Poltar, but it’s ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things. The shaman’s path is negotiation, nothing more. We tend the relationship with the powers so they bring us more benefit than ruin. We can do no more.”

— Richard K. Morgan

52. “Humans, short-lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.”

— Richard K. Morgan

53. “I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors,” Ringil recited for him, hollowly. “I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.”

— Richard K. Morgan

54. “There should have been a better farewell. But in the end, there never is. And we take what meagre scraps we can find.”

— Richard K. Morgan

55. “This enemy you cannot kill,” I murmured. He nodded and finished the quote for me. “You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.”

— Richard K. Morgan

56. “A weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension – you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”

— Richard K. Morgan

57. “Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash.”

— Richard K. Morgan

58. “See, once upon a time,” Yavuz was saying, “fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can’t live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge’s terms a non-adaptive trait.”

— Richard K. Morgan

59. “It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.”

— Richard K. Morgan

60. “Pull on the cold, clinking mail of your professional detachment, Archeth Indamaninarmal, inhabit it until it starts to feel warm and accustomed, and in time you’ll forget you’re wearing it at all. You’ll only notice when it works, when it stops you feeling the steel-edged bite of something that might otherwise have gotten through and done you some damage. And then you’ll just grin and shiver and shake off the blow, like warriors do.”

— Richard K. Morgan

61. “Most people don’t like to think things through. Too much effort. They’d rather have the edited visceral highlights.”

— Richard K. Morgan

62. “The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whiskey, burning...”

— Richard K. Morgan

63. “The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”

— Richard K. Morgan

64. “Lies are a precious currency – you have to be careful how and where you spend them.”

— Richard K. Morgan

65. “The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn’t offer this assurance, so it’s very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you’re in control.”

— Richard K. Morgan

66. “The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterward.”

— Richard K. Morgan

67. “Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power.”

— Richard K. Morgan

68. “I thought that was what religion was. Simplification for the hard of thinking.”

— Richard K. Morgan

69. “There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a bloodred sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.”

— Richard K. Morgan

70. “Choose your feelings as you would a weapon. This is what it is to be Majak.”

— Richard K. Morgan

71. “Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”

— Richard K. Morgan

72. “They tell you to save the ship at all costs. No one ever talks about whether the passengers and crew deserve all that effort.”

— Richard K. Morgan

73. “Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia.”

— Richard K. Morgan

74. “I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats. There.”

— Richard K. Morgan

75. “In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society.”

— Richard K. Morgan

76. “Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he’d absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he’d gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim’s. He’d known at some deep, cold level that he would cope. He was wrong. Utterly.”

— Richard K. Morgan

77. “He’s a pretty serious believer.’ ‘Yeah? Funny how it doesn’t get in the way of his commercial life.’ ‘Yeah, well. Organised religion, you know.”

— Richard K. Morgan

78. “An-Kirilnar is.” The Helmsman stopped dead, so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize there were no more words coming. Flicker of shifting light across the optics, there and gone. But this time she saw it for certain. “Angfal?” “Quests are pretexts, Archeth. They are tales told, narrative blankets to wrap you against the cold you cannot bear.”

— Richard K. Morgan

79. “We live in bloodbath times... and looks like tonight is bath night.”

— Richard K. Morgan

80. “Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.”

— Richard K. Morgan

81. “Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative – which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys – but they weren’t any kind of pushover, either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.”

— Richard K. Morgan

82. “He’d already made her for Kiriath and was backing off like a poet asked to wash dishes.”

— Richard K. Morgan

83. “What you feel is not yours. You need not own it. Creatures like these breed the fear in you as we fatten a buffalo calf, and with similar intent.”

— Richard K. Morgan

84. “The only problem they had... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.”

— Richard K. Morgan

85. “If I know anything about stack engineers, they’ll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.”

— Richard K. Morgan

86. “What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me.”

— Richard K. Morgan

87. “The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting.”

— Richard K. Morgan

88. “The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there’s a strange comfort to the way it hurts.”

— Richard K. Morgan

89. “She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding, and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb.”

— Richard K. Morgan

90. “Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant.”

— Richard K. Morgan

91. “Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom, please. On.”

— Richard K. Morgan

92. “When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.”

— Richard K. Morgan

93. “A Man Down Is Not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.”

— Richard K. Morgan

94. “I’ve heard that said about outlanders and enemies before, and I don’t generally trust it. Just too bloody convenient, the quick and easy way to deal with difference. Oh, they’re not like us, they’re insane. It saves you having to think too much.”

— Richard K. Morgan

95. “It seems lies come very easily to your race. They lie to those they lead, to their mates and fellows no matter how close- drawn, even to themselves if it will make the world around them more bearable. It is hard to know what to believe in this place.” Something.”

— Richard K. Morgan

96. “Look,” the Ryker copy said, “I’m you. I know everything you know. What’s the harm in talking about this stuff?” “If you know everything I know, what’s the point of talking about it?” “Sometimes, it helps to externalize things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.”

— Richard K. Morgan

97. “And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.”

— Richard K. Morgan

98. “Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch. These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.”

— Richard K. Morgan

99. “Like all lotteries, it was an attempt to distract and dilute labor force discontent with irrational hope.”

— Richard K. Morgan

100. “Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.”

— Richard K. Morgan