Ancillary Justice Quotes

Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.

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

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

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

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

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?

...it’s so easy, isn’t it, to decide the people you’re fighting aren’t really human. Or maybe you have to do it, to be able to kill them.

I didn't get where I am by having reasonable goals

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?

Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.

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

Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.

It’s the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren’t small at all.

We have a saying, where I come from: Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.

People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren't quite so simple.

In that case,” I said, “go fuck yourself.” Which she could actually, literally do, in fact.

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 events in ways too chaotic or subtle to trace ... if everyone were to consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimetre, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.

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

Ships have feelings.

Choose my aim, take one step and then the next. It had never been anything else.

Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

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

If you're going to do something that crazy, save it for when it'll make a difference, Lieutenant Skaaiat had said, and I had agreed. I still agree. The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference.

If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.

Information is power. Information is security. Plans made with imperfect information are fatally flawed, will fail or succeed on the toss of a coin.

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 be murdered and raped and stolen from? You said you knew justice when you heard it. Well, what is your justice but you allowed to treat us as you like, and us condemned for even attempting to defend ourselves?

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

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

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 my whole life, and I was walking around thinking I was better than you, even half dead and no use to anyone, because my family is old, because I was born better.

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 your side.

It’s so easy to go along with things, isn’t it?” Skaaiat said. “Especially when, as you say, it profits you.

You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of.

She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way.

The flower of justice is peace,

Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative,

Luxury always comes at someone else's expense.

Libraries are a tremendous and valuable resource, and I'm note sure it's possible to have too many of them.

Pain is a warning,” said Anaander Mianaai. “What would happen if you removed all discomfort from your life? No,” Mianaai continued, ignoring Seivarden’s obvious distress at her words, “I value that moral indignation. I encourage it.

The smallest, most seemingly insignificant event is part of an intricate whole and to understand why one particular mote of dust falls in one particular path, and lands in one particular location, is to understand the will of Amaat. There is no such thing as “just a coincidence.” Nothing happens by chance, but only according to the mind of God.

Have a beer instead.

You do have a thousand years’ seniority, after all.” “A thousand years’ back pay,” said a dock inspector, in an awed voice.

[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. (Ancillary Justice)

I had once had twenty bodies, twenty pairs of eyes, and hundreds of others that I could access if I needed or desired it. Now I could only see in one direction, could only see the vast expanse behind me if I turned my head and blinded myself to what was in front of me.

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 for the universe. The death and destruction, these are unavoidable by-products of this one, supreme good.

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 because they believe it’s the right thing to do. No one likes killing people.” Strigan made a sardonic noise "No one?" "Not many," I amended. "Not enough to fill the Radch's warships".

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 is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place. Or at the very least, not nearly as interesting as the enchanting idea that your people are not newcomers to their homes but in fact only recolonized the place they had belonged from the beginning of time. One meets this claim anywhere one finds a remotely human-habitable planet.

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 consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimeter, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.

It’s personal.” It was just that with me personal affected a great many others.

If everyone were to consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimeter, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.

I knew and cared nothing about the will of the gods. I only knew that I would land where I myself had been cast, wherever that would be.

Half your anger is for yourself.” She ate the last bite of pastry and brushed her small gloved hands together, showering fragments of sugar icing onto the grass. “But it’s such a monumentally enormous anger even half is quite devastating.

If you’ve got power and money and connections, some differences won’t change anything. Or if you’re resigned to dying in the near future, which I gather is your position at the moment. It’s the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren’t small at all. What you call no difference is life and death to them.

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 and will influence your actions. Your choices.

This struck me as something of a double bind. Speak and your possession of an opinion was plain, clear to anyone. Refrain from speaking and still this was proof of an opinion. If Captain Rubran were to say, Truly, I have no opinion on the matter, would that merely be another proof she had one?

I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through non-Radchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people. I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai—never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound (trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned, tied). Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn't need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home.

I considered for a moment what would be the right facial expression, and made it.

Death will overtake us In whatever manner already fated Everyone falls to it And so long as I’m ready I don’t fear it No matter what form it takes.

Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing.

Power requires neither permission nor forgiveness.

Ifs and would-haves changed nothing.

If you're going to do something that crazy, save it for when it'll make a difference

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

No Justice of Toren medic would give One Esk a body with a voice like Breq’s. Not unless she wanted to seriously annoy the Esk lieutenants.

Virtues may be made to serve whatever end profits you. Still, they exist and will influence your actions. Your choices.

If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is.

As imperfect as these solutions may be, one thing is clear to me: mixing ancillary social causes with the pursuit of profit is a bad investment in every sense.

My heart is a fish Hiding in the water-grass In the green, in the green.

The omen Stillness had flipped, become Movement. And Justice was about to land before me, clear and unambiguous.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

Good necessitates evil.

When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn’t stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.

Civilian casualties?” I asked. “There always are.

Fuck, you are an ancillary!

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 had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people.

It’s easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it’s real, when the moment comes to choose.

The gender thing is a giveaway, though. Only a Radchaai would misgender people the way you do." I'd guessed wrong. "I can't see under your clothes. And even if I could, that's not always a reliable indicator.

Amaat conceived of light, and conceiving of light also necessarily conceived of not-light, and light and darkness sprang forth. This was the first Emanation, EtrepaBo; Light/Darkness. The other three, implied and necessitated by that first, are EskVar (Beginning/Ending), IssaInu (Movement/Stillness), and VahnItr (Existence/Nonexistence). These four Emanations variously split and recombined to create the universe. Everything that is, emanates from Amaat.

—(...) Sin embargo, la cuestión del género te delata. Solo un radchaai confundiría el género de las personas como tú lo haces. Me había equivocado al deducir su género. —No puedo ver debajo de su ropa. Y, aunque pudiera, eso no siempre es un indicador fiable.

When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are.

She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn’t entirely certain. It wouldn’t have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way. This

Bir harekete dönüşmediği, fiziksel olarak bir varlık elde etmediği sürece düşünceler gelip geçicidir ve ortaya çıktıkları anda eriyip yok olurlar. Seni bir seçim yapmak zorunda bırakmadıkları, ne kadar önemsiz olursa olsun bir eylem ya da harekete neden olmadıkları sürece anlamsızlardır. Harekete geçiren düşünceler tehlikeli olabilir. Geçirmeyenlerin hiçbir anlamı yoktur.

It seems very straightforward when I say “I.” At the time, “I” meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from “me” than my hand is while it’s engaged in a task that doesn’t require my full attention. Nearly twenty years later “I” would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I–Justice of Toren and I–One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which “I” was one and after which “I” was “we.” It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable? On one level the answer is simple—it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. 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? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that’s only hindsight. The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I–Justice of Toren might not also be I–One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk’s memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt. The moment I—“I”—was surprised by it.

The Romans have provided a lot of writers with a model for various interstellar empires, of course, and no wonder. The Roman Empire is a really good example of a large empire that, in one form or another, functioned for quite a long time over a very large area. And over all that time, there was all sorts of exciting drama – civil wars and assassinations and revolts and bits breaking off and being forced back in ... But I didn’t want my future – however fanciful it was – to be entirely European. The Radchaai aren’t meant to be Romans in Space.

The creation of the Undergarden was no doubt unintended,” I continued, as Mercy of Kalr showed me a brief flash of Kalr Eight speaking sternly to a junior priest, “but as it has benefited you, you tell yourselves that its condition is also just and proper.” That constant trio, justice, propriety, and benefit. They could not, in theory, exist alone. Nothing just was improper, nothing beneficial was unjust. “Fleet Captain,” began Governor Giarod. Indignant. “I hardly think—” “Everything necessitates its opposite,” I said, cutting her off. “How can you be civilized if there is no uncivilized?” Civilized. Radchaai. The word was the same. “If it did not benefit someone, somehow, there’d be plumbing here, and lights, and doors that worked, and medics who would come for an emergency.

Today, the War on Drugs has given birth to a system of mass incarceration that governs not just a small fraction of a racial or ethnic minority but entire communities of color. In ghetto communities, nearly everyone is either directly or indirectly subject to the new caste system. The system serves to redefine the terms of the relationship of poor people of color and their communities to mainstream, white society, ensuring their subordinate and marginal status. The criminal and civil sanctions that were once reserved for a tiny minority are now used to control and oppress a racially defined majority in many communities, and the systematic manner in which the control is achieved reflects not just a difference in scale. The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. Prior drug wars were ancillary to the prevailing caste system. This time the drug war is the system of control.

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.

Almost wishing the Radchaai language concerned itself with gender so I could use it wrongly and sound even more foreign. Almost.

I was astonished at her icy calm, given I knew she’d been angry ever since

Seivarden’s lips quirked in what might be taken for appreciation of a compliment, but almost certainly wasn’t.

If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference, Lieutenant Skaaiat had said, and I had agreed. I still agree.

Perhaps a great deal of difference. Perhaps none at all. There are too many unknowns. Too many apparently predictable people who are, in reality, balanced on a knife-edge, or whose trajectories might be easily changed, if only I knew.

One plain gold token hung on the cuff of her right sleeve, just next to the edge of the glove, the placement that of something she intended to be reminded of, as much for herself to see as anyone else.

A thousand years’ back pay,” said a dock inspector, in an awed voice.

And you don’t like my saying that, but here’s the truth: luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.” “It doesn’t trouble yours?” Lieutenant Skaaiat laughed, gaily, as though they were discussing something completely different, a game of counters or a good tea shop. “When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are.

What difference would that have made? Perhaps a great deal of difference. Perhaps none at all. There are too many unknowns. Too many apparently predictable people who are, in reality, balanced on a knife-edge, or whose trajectories might be easily changed, if only I knew. If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.

If you’d refused, nothing would have changed, except you’d be dead too. You did what you had to do,

Courtesy,” said Lieutenant Dariet, her voice uncharacteristically prim, “is always proper, and always beneficial

So in the moment the Lord of Mianaai bestowed citizenship on the Shis’urnans, in that very instant they became civilized.” The sentence was a circular one—the question Lieutenant Awn was asking is a difficult one in that language. “I mean, one day your Issas are shooting people for failing to speak respectfully enough—don’t tell me it didn’t happen, because I know it did, and worse—and it doesn’t matter because they’re not Radchaai, not civilized.” Lieutenant Awn had switched momentarily into the bit of the local Orsian language she knew, because the Radchaai words refused to let her mean what she wished to say. “And any measures are justified in the name of civilization.

Do you grieve for your ships,” I asked, “because they’re dead? Or because their loss means they aren’t here to make you feel connected and cared about?” Silence. “Or do you think those are the same thing?” Still no answer. “I will answer my own question: you were never a favorite of any of the ships you served on. You don’t believe it’s possible for a ship to have favorites.

I wasn’t, apparently, responding to any of my lieutenants, or even Commander Tiaund, but when Lieutenant Dariet cried, “Ship! Have you lost your mind?” I answered. “The Lord of the Radch shot Lieutenant Awn!” cried a segment somewhere in the corridor behind me. “She’s been on Var deck all this time.” That silenced my officers—including Lieutenant Dariet—for only a second. “If that’s even true… but if it is, the Lord of the Radch wouldn’t have shot her for no reason.” Behind me the segments of myself that hadn’t yet begun their climb down the lift shaft hissed and gasped in frustration and anger. “Useless!” I heard myself say to Lieutenant Dariet as at the end of the corridor I manually opened the hold door. “You’re as bad as Lieutenant Issaaia! At least Lieutenant Awn knew she held her in contempt!” An indignant cry, surely Lieutenant Issaaia, and Dariet said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not functioning right, Ship!