Top 120 Robert Jackson Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

2. “History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

3. “Remember – move thoughtfully, give freedom to others, and you’ll rarely do wrong...”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

4. “There’s no such thing as a good death... It’s just a dull, stupid thing we all have to do eventually. To ask meaning of it is to ask meaning of a shadow.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

5. “Sigrud is a hammer in a world of nails, and he is satisfied knowing only that.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

6. “Lonely places draw lonely people... They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

7. “Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

8. “The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

9. “I wish I did not know some parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

10. “Is it ignorance if you don’t care to know it?” “Yes. That is almost the definition of ignorance, actually.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

11. “Is this how governments are made? Forcing decisions on wounded people in the middle of the night?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

12. “Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

13. “She devoted her life to this place, this work. If that doesn’t make a home, Turyin Mulaghesh, then nothing does.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

14. “It’s a symbiotic relationship: those two excel at being idiots, and I excel at shooting idiots. Everyone gets what they want.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

15. “Good historians keep the past in their head and the future in their heart.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

16. “They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important – that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

17. “Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties,” says Sigrud. He stares into the sky, and the white sunlight glints off his many scars. “They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

18. “Scars are windows to bitterness – it is best to leave them untouched.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

19. “One has no room for vengeance,′ says Shara, ’when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

20. “The Divine may have created many hells”, he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

21. “We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

22. “As if having you by force was the same as having you.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

23. “In my operational days, there were three ways of thinking about things. There were things you knew. Then there were things you knew you didn’t know. And then there were the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.” “No wonder we keep having so many international crises,” she says, “if you lot are running around talking like that.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

24. “Coffee refreshes the body,” says Shara. “Tea refreshes the soul.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

25. “We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present – do we not?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

26. “Bad blood,” he said, “is still blood.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

27. “When the world grinds you down, you pick a handful of fires to hold close to your heart.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

28. “And then he understands: it’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

29. “Remember – move thoughtfully, give freedom to others, and you’ll rarely do wrong, Sancia. I’ve learned that now. I wish I’d known it in life.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

30. “Shara now sits on committees that decide who shall be nominated to be committee chairs for other committees; then, after these meetings, she sits on committee meetings to formulate agendas for future meetings; and after these, she attends committee meetings deciding who shall be appointed to appoint appointments to committees.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

31. “A people believe in a god’ – she completes the circle -′ and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

32. “Why are you out here risking your life? Is Justice such an odd thing to desire? Justice is a luxury. No said Gregor. It is not. It is a right. And it is a right that has long been denied. He stared out at the city... I would shed every drop of blood in my body for such a thing.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

33. “This is a rich man’s fight,” said Sancia. “A rich man’s game. And we’re all just pieces on the board to you. You think you’re different, Orso, but you’re just like all the rest of them!”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

34. “I don’t think we can build much of a future,′ says Shara, ’without knowing the truth of the past. It’s time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

35. “I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

36. “Gregor Dandolo did his utmost to follow the laws: both the laws of the city, and his own moral laws of the universe. But more and more these days, one seemed to disagree with the other.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

37. “You’ve always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it’s just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do... So when you need to do it, there’s no need to make a show of it.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

38. “I... suppose I find you... refreshingly uncontained.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

39. “I never saw a country before,” says the robed man. “All I saw was the earth under my feet.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

40. “A soldier serves not to take, they don’t strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn’t a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That’s what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we’re asked to do.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

41. “The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behavior; that is in the hands. Watch a man’s hands, and you watch his heart.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

42. “I don’t have the time or the energy to hate,” says Shara. “I only wish to understand. People are what they are.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

43. “He remembers looking up in his jail cell and seeing a needle of sunlight poking through, and trying to cradle that tiny pinhole of light in his hands.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

44. “Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are – honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

45. “When in doubt, be patient, and watch.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

46. “If one were to protest all the injustices of life,” says Sigrud, “great and small, one would have no time for living.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

47. “The city knows. It remembers. Its past is written in its bones, though the past now speaks in silences.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

48. “Just once I would like to get eight hours of sleep, thinks Shara. I would pay for them. Steal them. Something.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

49. “And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

50. “She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett