Top 80 Seth Dickinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In time the things you’ve done become too large to carry with you. So you set them down. And you think that you are free. But then you look back and see that someone else carries your burden now: you see that you have dropped your weight upon those who stood behind you.”

— Seth Dickinson

2. “I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”

— Seth Dickinson

3. “That we are not free. Not even when we march beside them, nor even when we lead them. Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.”

— Seth Dickinson

4. “When you are disemboweled in battle, you tie your guts up tight, and you keep fighting. Later the wound can kill you. Once you’ve won.”

— Seth Dickinson

5. “In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will.”

— Seth Dickinson

6. “In our grand successes over the past century we have invented a monster called a middle class. Our predecessors pillaged the Ashen Sea, and now the people are accustomed to receiving that pillage. And they are accustomed to their innocence. If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know.”

— Seth Dickinson

7. “Baru,” Yawa murmured, in a raw cold voice like city slush, “we should talk. You drink all day and lie awake in your hammock all night. You’re sick. You’re dying, in fact, and you don’t know it, because by the time you’re dead it will feel quite normal to be lifeless.”

— Seth Dickinson

8. “Banking was the most powerful weapon in the world, because people stored their wealth in banks, and the banks could loan that wealth out to fund great labors. You could tax your people dead to fund your armies, and they would hate you for it. But give them a bank and a fair interest rate and they would give you everything they had and let you do what you pleased with it and ask only to have it back when you were done.”

— Seth Dickinson

9. “Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.”

— Seth Dickinson

10. “The problem is caring too much, caring so much you can’t ask for help because everyone else is already in so much pain.”

— Seth Dickinson

11. “WHEN she was alone again Baru snuffed out all the candles and thus hidden from herself she tried to let herself weep in fear. Still it would not come. She had built the dams too strong, polished the gears too perfectly. Bargained too well. She sat in the dark and fell through the hollow of herself for a time. But helplessness came uneasily to her.”

— Seth Dickinson

12. “Honor,” Apparitor murmured, “is just a credit rating for violence.”

— Seth Dickinson

13. “Power was not the province of those who made choices. Power was the ability to set the context in which choices were made.”

— Seth Dickinson

14. “I am Baru Cormorant,” she protested, “accountant.”

— Seth Dickinson

15. “The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast.”

— Seth Dickinson

16. “And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.”

— Seth Dickinson

17. “Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said.”

— Seth Dickinson

18. “I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.”

— Seth Dickinson

19. “She accepted the bargain without understanding the price. A terrible mistake, for an accountant.”

— Seth Dickinson

20. “She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.”

— Seth Dickinson

21. “Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.”

— Seth Dickinson

22. “She chose when and where she would die. She chose the meaning of her death, and she chose the method. Rare is that gift, isn’t it? Rare is the choice to write the end of your own story.”

— Seth Dickinson

23. “Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.”

— Seth Dickinson

24. “Her thoughts ran in cannibal circles.”

— Seth Dickinson

25. “As long as you believe that is all you are, you will never be anything but a piece of the machine.” “A piece can change the whole. It may take patience, or sacrifice, but – ” “This machine? Better to break it, and build something new.”

— Seth Dickinson

26. “I used to wonder if you were a monster. Now I know the answer. If you want power in this world, power enough to change it, it seems you have to be.”

— Seth Dickinson

27. “When things break underfoot, you know that you are going forward.”

— Seth Dickinson

28. “This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.”

— Seth Dickinson

29. “I believe that the fate of the entire human species balances on this brief century. We live in a narrow and closing doorway, and the forces of discord and disaster close in on us. Again and again the great empires of the past have been struck down.”

— Seth Dickinson

30. “Your help is a fishhook.”

— Seth Dickinson

31. “Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny.”

— Seth Dickinson

32. “Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her.”

— Seth Dickinson

33. “The world is made of stories, which bind us all together, and impossible stories are the best of all, for they bind us in impossible ways.”

— Seth Dickinson

34. “Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.”

— Seth Dickinson

35. “I have committed a terrible crime,” she said, voice firm, controlled, machined to a polish. “So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.”

— Seth Dickinson

36. “Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”

— Seth Dickinson

37. “A cultural misconception sustained by lurid rumor? In our great republic?”

— Seth Dickinson

38. “Among societies with only two sexes, they often chose to pass as a man or a woman, and became expert at it.”

— Seth Dickinson

39. “Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else.”

— Seth Dickinson

40. “No living thing ever defeated Tain Hu in battle. Only the tide could fight her. Only the moon and the sea together could bring her down.”

— Seth Dickinson

41. “Aurdwynn has one great habit, Your Excellence, one constant touchstone, no matter who rules.” Her secretary hesitated over the map, his own fingers half-curled, as if of half a mind to draw her hand away from a flame. “Rebellion.”

— Seth Dickinson

42. “Everyone was someone else’s instrument. But she would have to take him into confidence and use him as a trusted instrument nonetheless.”

— Seth Dickinson

43. “War is a way to kill those who least deserve death, and enrich those who least deserve life.”

— Seth Dickinson

44. “First exhaustion, then shame, then callous cynicism. Then collapse. But I’m not there yet, I’m not past cynicism. I still want to help.”

— Seth Dickinson

45. “Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours.”

— Seth Dickinson

46. “THE hardest run is the run downhill. The world wants to pull you forward by your own momentum and dash you down on your face, and you must resist it: the art of running downhill is the art of the controlled descent.”

— Seth Dickinson

47. “Oh,” she said. “Yes.” She was warm with the wine, with the shape of the plan she’d begun to form, and could not keep the merriment from her voice, the joy of reaching out into the world and altering it. “There will be a price.”

— Seth Dickinson

48. “She liked his advise better than Pinion’s, because it was full of things to accomplish now rather than things to avoid forever.”

— Seth Dickinson

49. “It’s hard to find good stories now.”

— Seth Dickinson

50. “No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.”

— Seth Dickinson