Top 120 Robert Jackson Bennett Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “They said I was one thing. But I have changed my mind.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

102. “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

103. “The choices you make will change you over time, Sancia. Make sure they don’t change you into something you don’t recognize – or you might wind up like me.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

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

— Robert Jackson Bennett

105. “The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

106. “Assume nothing, Shara reminds herself. You do not know until you know.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

107. “There are many dangers here, child, she’d said once. Many. Many ugly things you’re going to have to do. It will be a great contest for you. And you’re going to think: How do I win? And the answer is – so long as you are alive, you are winning. The only hope you should ever have is to see the next day, and the next. Some here will whisper of liberty – but you can’t be free if you aren’t alive.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

108. “What an easy thing it is, to make Americans destroy ourselves, she thinks. You just have to make a spectacle out of it.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

109. “I have taken many lives in my life. Many children, perhaps husbands, wives, parents. Perhaps it is only just that this same violation was inflicted upon me. Perhaps it is just that one who lives a life of war becomes a refugee from it.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

110. “Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you do it right!”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

111. “When I come back to you, if I come back to you, will I know you? Will you be the city of my memory? Or will you be a stranger?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

112. “Fight the battles before you, not the ones from so long ago.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

113. “But it is a regrettable thing that in order to fix a monstrous world, one must become a little monstrous in one’s own right.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

114. “All is inevitable. To argue with fate is to argue with a river.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

115. “No. There are people in this world who learned the lessons I never did, the lessons that our son has learned all too late – that you are right. There is no magic fix. That a better world can only be brought by what we give to one another, and nothing more.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

116. “So instead of committing robbery, I made tea.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

117. “Civilization is often a thing that is barely managed.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

118. “The only comparison she had for it was the experience of being asleep in your own bed, and having your pet jump up and nestle in the back of your leg – the faint, warm awareness of another being nestling into you, whether you liked it or not.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

119. “But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

120. “Learn what your city has forgotten. What men of power have forgotten time and time again, throughout history – that there is always, always something mightier.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

121. “We did not talk any more of what we’d witnessed, he at the walls and I in the city. The things we’d seen and done now felt too big for words. Silence was a better language.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

122. “Please provide location and density of mass!”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

123. “We do these ugly, dull things for a reason – to make a space where folk can live, celebrate, and know joy and love.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

124. “Civilization is often a task that is only barely managed. But harden your heart and slow your blood. The towers of justice are built one brick at a time. We have more to build yet.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

125. “We built this, I thought. We have built this unnatural thing, and it has built us in turn.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

126. “She needed money. She always needed money. Money to bribe someone, money to buy tools to get more money, money to get a safe place to store her damned money. Life was cheap, and cash, as ever, remained dauntingly expensive.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

127. “The emperor offered many blessings to the Legion, it seemed, but precious few for the Iudex. How simple the titans seemed, and how impossible justice felt.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

128. “But I am reluctant to assume maliciousness when incompetence is a better explanation.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

129. “For the empire is huge. Complex. Often unwieldy and slow. And in many places, weak. A massive colossus, stretching out across the cantons, one in whose shadow we all live... and yet it is prone to wounds, infections, fevers, and ill humors. But its strangest feature is that the more its citizens feel it is broken, the more broken it actually becomes.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

130. “You know, you are not a stupid person, Din.” “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, pleased. “Or, rather, not an unusually stupid person.” “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, far less pleased.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

131. “Sen sez imperiya. The Empire is strong because it recognizes the value in all our people. Including you, Dinios Kol. And when the Empire is weak, it is often because a powerful few have denied us the abundance of our people.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

132. “I glanced down at my boots, now worn and stained from all my travels. They didn’t look quite so bad, I thought. Perhaps they would look even better with a bit more wear.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

133. “It’ll just go on. More fixes gone awry. The mad pride of men who think themselves engineers of all creation.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

134. “To serve is a tremendously humbling thing. How easy it is to mistake glory and fame for duty! But duty is thankless, invisible, Forgettable – but oh, so very necessary.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

135. “What a tool cynicism is to the corrupt, claiming the whole of the creation is broken and fraudulent, and thus we are all excused to indulge in whatever sins we wish – for what’s a little more unfairness, in this unfair world?”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

136. “What a world it is, Signum,” said Fayazi, “where you are forced to change yourself, break yourself, all for a little scrap of money.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

137. “To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett