Top 120 Robert Jackson Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In Shara’s estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it: who belongs to which group, and why; where are they now, and how are we sure, and do we have someone else in the region; and now that we have cataloged those groups, what threat level should they be categorized under; and so on, and so on, and so on.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

52. “You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There’s a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a woman at any age.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

53. “It is nearly two o’clock in the morning, and Tom Bolan is ass-over-head, military-grade, wearing-more-booze-than-he’s-ingesting drunk.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

54. “Every innovation – technological, sociological, or otherwise – begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

55. “Peace is but the absence of war. War and conflict form the sea through which nation-states swim. Some who have had the fortune to find clear, calm waters believe otherwise. They have forgotten that war is momentum. War is natural. And war makes one strong.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

56. “So if you’re losing the debate, you change the conversation.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

57. “Deserve.′ How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

58. “Just because you won the War doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like!′ says Yaroslav. ‘And just because we lost it doesn’t mean you can strip us of everything we value!”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

59. “We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions... Yet when we consider our existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control... All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious hidden systems – and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out... What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

60. “I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief... of a party... of a finance system... of a power. All I see is privilege and its consequences. States are not in my opinion composed of structures supporting privilege but of structures denying it... in other words deciding who is not invited to the table.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

61. “Saypur says, ‘Dance,’ you say, ‘How many turns?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

62. “I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

63. “The older you get, the more voices you get in the back of your head.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

64. “The word everyone forgets is ‘serve’... Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking the city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of ‘taking,’ as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a solider, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

65. “Comes he walking windy-ways, wandering under spruces and through canyons and across shadowy glens, hands in his pockets and head bowed as if all the weight of the world lies teetering on his slumped shoulders.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

66. “The world is a coward... It does not change before your face; it waits until your back is turned, and pounces...”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

67. “Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

68. “To discuss the reality of our global position is considered impolite.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

69. “Pistols are the choice of the afraid. Pistols are the choice of the vigilant.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

70. “So many systems, so many pieces... more complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

71. “Why is it,” says Vohannes as he walks her to the door, “that whenever we finish our business, it feels like neither of us got what we wanted?” “Perhaps we conduct the wrong sort of business.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

72. “If I leave anything behind in this world, I hope it is my work.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

73. “Traditional,” she echoed. “What a curious word that is. So bland, and yet often so poisonous.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

74. “Time renders all people and all things silent. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time that I have.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

75. “There, she thought, shaking off another rat and brushing away the turds. That wasn’t so bad.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

76. “A struck match sounds like a kiss in the dark, sometimes.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

77. “No one does. No one really knows how to be happy. You just get close, sometimes. That’s all I want – just to be close.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

78. “Yet I now ask of you – are you marauders or are you servants? Do you give power to others, or do you hoard it? Do you fight not to have something, but rather fight so that others might one day have something? Is your blade a part of your soul, or is it a burden, a tool, to be used with care? Are you soldiers, my children, or are you savages?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

79. “Just because the nightmare you expected comes true, it doesn’t make it any less terrifying.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

80. “Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

81. “One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you.” Taty.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

82. “Warfare is light. Warfare and conflict are the energies with which this world functions. To claim otherwise is to claim your very veins are not filled with blood, to claim that your heart is still and silent. You knew this once. Once in the hills of this country you understood that to wage war was to be alive, to shed blood was to bask in the light of the sun.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

83. “Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

84. “In retrospect they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

85. “It’s like an eraser, only I designed it to be attracted to erase one specific thing... the tissue lining the human heart.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

86. “Rifles are for people who are going out to do shooting. But a man carrying a pistol – he’s worried about getting shot at.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

87. “But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

88. “Torture usually gets you whatever you want to hear. And people are usually much more forgiving of this method. Mostly because they’re never quite sure any of it really happened.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

89. “Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don’t know that they’ve lost something, but they have.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

90. “But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all – it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

91. “There is no innovation that will ever spring from the minds of men that will not eventually be used for slaughter and control.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

92. “The political instinct might wear different clothes in different nations, but underneath the pomp and ceremony it’s the same ugliness.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

93. “I did what was necessary to gain my freedom. Wouldn’t you?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

94. “Humanity’s relationship with the Divine is one of mutual give and take, and we mutually opted to part ways. But this perpetuation – setting up a way of thinking, and just letting it run – it doesn’t always yield good results.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

95. “What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

96. “Do you not enslave people now?” asks the man. “Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

97. “No matter what happens, to either of us,” says Sigrud, “you have always been a very good friend to me, Shara Komayd. I have known very few good people. But I think that you are one of them.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

98. “And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

99. “Is it sleep you want to find?” he asks quietly. “Or dreams you wish to escape?” She.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

100. “Old texts say many things. You say these things as though they are special – as if it is unusual for one person to see another in pain, and wish to help. As if, he says quietly, to do the extraordinary – or what you think is extraordinary – a person must be told to do so, by the Divine.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett