The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference. I’m not only speaking of the small actions that, cumulatively, over time, or in great numbers, alter the course of...

You take what you want at the end of a gun, you murder and rape and steal, and you call it bringing civilization. And what is civilization, to you, but us being properly grateful to...

Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.

I value that moral indignation. I encourage it.

You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on...

If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.

Imagine your whole life aimed at conquest, at the spread of Radchaai space. You see murder and destruction on an unimaginable scale, but they see the spread of civilisation, of Justice and Propiety, of Benefit...

Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.

In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was—even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I...

Do you still think Mianaai controls the Radchaai through brainwashing or threats of execution? Those are there, they exist, yes, but most Radchaai, like people most places I have been, do what they’re supposed to...

Nearly everywhere I’ve been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity’s original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn’t, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it...

If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.

The single word that directs a person’s fate and ultimately the fates of those she comes in contact with is of course a common subject of entertainments and moralizing stories, but if everyone were to...

Not tea but blood!

Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing.” Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked. “Virtues may be made to serve whatever end profits you. Still, they exist...

Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.

Good necessitates evil.

You never knelt to get anywhere. You are where you are because you’re fucking capable, and willing to risk everything to do right, and I’ll never be half what you are even if I tried...

If that’s what you’re willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you love?

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those with emotions.

Ships have feelings.

…if anyone who speaks up to criticise something obviously evil is punished merely for speaking, civilisation will be in a bad way.

Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?