Primarch Quotes

Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch. Argal Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, "We are heretics, father.

That's all you get," said Alpharius, and split him in half. Alpharius sheathed his gladius, and dragged the sabre out of his torso. He tossed it away, and walked through the liter of bodies to where Namatjira was kneeling on the deck. "Please! My lord primarch! Please, I beg you!" Namtjira pleaded, his hands making a desperate namaste. Alpharius drew his boltgun. "Why?" shrieked Namatjira. "Why are you doing this? "For the Emperor," said Alpharius, and pulled the trigger.

Freedom is the only thing worth fighting for. It is why tyrants always fall. - Primarch Angron

Only Angels may fly. --Sanguinius, to Ka'Bandha

Striving for perfection is not foolish, but assuming you have achieved it most certainly is.

You let the city burn so that you would have light to load your guns by.

Perfection has never been about the body, or even the mind. Perfection is a state only the soul can achieve, and, my poor, ignorant brother, there is such perfection in rage.

Victory is not fate. It is an act of will.' Primarch Rogal Dorn

It was the face of a general to follow unto death, the face of a teacher at whose feet the wise would fight to sit, the face of a king made for the adoration of worlds: the face of a primarch. And rage made it the face of a beast.

I lived, captain-general. It was short, and it was painful, but by the nine hells, I lived. I'd rather have it that way than yours - no joy, no hate, no fear. Unbreakable without growth, immortal without passion." - Primarch Ushotan

Boredom,’ said Curze to his flesh sculpture, many years later, ‘is among the greatest of all human sins. It demands mischief to fill it, and mischief begets disorder. Boredom is pernicious, bringing forth wickedness in those who might remain guiltless. I do not know how much to blame boredom for what happened on Nostramo, but surely it must have played its part.

Sometimes...’ He lays a hand on Angron’s shoulder. ‘Sometimes what you need more than anything in the world is to know that there is someone lower than you. That no matter how dark it may seem, you’re not at the absolute bottom. It isn’t much, but people take power where they can in this world to survive. Watching us die while they still get to live, it’s all the power they’ll ever have.

Loken tried to imagine the future, but the image would not form. Death would wipe them all from history. Not even the great First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon would survive forever. There would be a time when Abaddon no longer waged bloody war across the territories of humanity. Loken sighed. That would be a sad day indeed. Men would cry out for Abaddon’s return, but he would never come. He tried to picture the manner of his own death. Fabled, imaginary combats flashed through his mind. He imagined himself at the Emperor’s side, fighting some great, last stand against an unknown foe. Primarch Horus would be there, of course. He had to be. It wouldn’t be the same without him. Loken would battle, and die, and perhaps even Horus would die, to save the Emperor at the last. Glory. Glory, like he’d never known. Such an hour would become so ingrained in the minds of men that it would be the cornerstone of all that came after. A great battle, upon which human culture would be based. Then, briefly, he imagined another death. Alone, far away from his comrades and his Legion, dying from cruel wounds on some nameless rock, his passing as memorable as smoke. Loken swallowed hard. Either way, his service was to the Emperor, and his service would be true to the end.

What empire has ever been anything more than the ruins that are discovered by the one that rises after it? They never last, Khârn. Ever. And neither will this one.

The lion snorted. 'You treat all as a game. That is why they sent for me - Malcador cannot trust you. No one can trust you. Your Legion is a rabble that would brawl among themselves if you were not there to smack their heads together.' 'If only they were more like yours,' said Russ, mockingly. 'Yes,' replied the Lion, exasperated. 'Yes. Is that so hard to imagine?' Russ loosened his arms, letting Krakenmaw swing lazily before him. 'I know why you do this. I know why you conquer, world after world, driving your sons after every campaign Malcador finds for you. But our father won't do it, brother. He won't choose a favourite. And if He did, it wouldn't be you - it would be Sanguinius, or Rogal, or Horus. So you're wasting yourself, trying to be noticed. It doesn't work like that.' The Lion let slip a scornful laugh. 'Not all of us are so without friends in the Palace, Leman, and you have no idea who our father favours.

These things were in the past now, many long years ago, though the memory remained as solid and present as his heartbeats. Time's passage had made the events seem almost crazed, hyper-real, stretched across a surreal dreamscape that felt more like a skjald's embellished saga than the intact past. Perhaps it had not happened like that. Perhaps the Lion had taken his Stormbirds to the Tyrant's fortress, and he himself had teleported in. Perhaps it had not been Ogvai there, but Gunn, or someone else. Had Bjorn been there too? It was a long time ago, so doubtful, but Bjorn seemed to always have been there, right from the start, just waiting for his time to come to maturity.

Sometimes, I consider whether the Emperor hated the Primarchs the way Fulgrim hates us." "Speak for yourself. Our father does not hate us." "Of course he does. From afar, you feel the lie of his warmth, the false affection you all so urgently crave. And he gives it to you but always from pity. You are his champion, yet still you cannot see it. You will never be as close to him as I was. You never see the way he really looks at us. Never seeing the wonders we wrought, only the limitations. Not our triumphs, just our flaws. He hates us, Lucius, because to Fulgrim, we are not his sons. We are a mirror, holding up an image before him that he can never do anything other than hate. We are his own failure made manifest, the miscarriage that comes about when a father tries to mould his children into something better than himself.

And he felt it. Rogal Dorn had been feeling it for days, weeks, building up, up, up, rising over him like a black fog, dragging at his limbs, clogging his mind, making him question every decision he made, every order he gave. He hadn’t had any respite at all, of any kind, for three months. Three months! His sharpness was going now, his reactions were slower. A billion functionaries depending on him for everything, reaching out to him, suffocating him with their endless demands, pleas for help, for guidance. A billion eyes, on him, all the time. And he’d fought, too. He’d fought. He’d fought primarchs, brothers he’d once thought of as equals or betters. He’d seen the hatred in Perturabo’s eyes, the mania in Fulgrim’s, stabbing at him, poisoning him. Every duel, every brief foray into combat, had chipped a bit more off, had weakened the foundations a little further. Fulgrim had been the worst. His brother’s old form, so pleasing to the eye, had gone, replaced by bodily corruption so deep he scarcely had the words for it. That degradation repulsed him almost more than anything else. It showed just how far you could fall, if you lost your footing in reality completely. You couldn’t show that repulsion. You couldn’t betray the doubt, or give away the fatigue. You couldn’t give away so much as a flicker of weakness, or the game was up, so Dorn’s face remained just as it always had been – static, flinty, curt. He kept his shoulders back, spine straight. He hid the fevers that raged behind his eyes, the bone-deep weariness that throbbed through every muscle, all for show, all to give those who looked up to him something to cling on to, to believe in. The Emperor, his father, was gone, silent, locked in His own unimaginable agonies, and so everything else had crashed onto his shoulders. The weight of the entire species, all their frailties and imperfections, wrapped tight around his mouth and throat and nostrils, choking him, drowning him, making him want to cry out loud, to cower away from it, something he would never do, could never do, and so he remained where he was, caught between the infinite weight of Horus’ malice and the infinite demands of the Emperor’s will, and it would break him, he knew, break him open like the walls themselves, which were about to break now too, despite all he had done, but had it been enough, yes it had, no it could not have been, they would break, they must not break… He clenched his fist, curling the fingers up tight. His mind was racing again. He was on the edge, slipping into a fugue state, the paralysis he dreaded. It came from within. It came from without. Something – something – was making the entire structure around him panic, weaken, fail in resolve. He was not immune. He was the pinnacle – when the base was corrupted, he, too, eventually, would shatter.

He could think of nothing more to say that would diffuse the Primarch’s anger.

I cannot accept that,' said Uriel. 'The destruction of the Emperor's loyal subjects cannot be right.' 'We cannot always do what is right, Uriel. There is often a great gulf in the difference between the way things are and the way we believe they should be. Sometimes we must learn to accept the things we cannot change.' 'No, lord admiral, I believe we must endeavour to change the things we cannot accept. It is by striving against that which is perceived as wrong that makes a great warrior. The primarch himself said that when a warrior makes peace with his fear and stands against it, he becomes a true hero. For if you do not fear a thing, where is the courage in standing against it?

One tends to accept most things my father says. It is not a matter of His word being law, although it unquestionably is. It is more the case that His word is truth. You come to see that, of course, what He has said must be the case. And if it is not, by some standard of measurement, the truth, then you can be sure that steps will be taken to ensure that it becomes true. In such a manner does my father organize the world to His desires.

He had always wanted the world to be just like that – no doubts, no lingering areas of hesitation or equivocation, just action, purity of will and deed, the knowledge that whatever he did could never be, and could never have been, otherwise. From the first day of this rebellion, everything had shaken that single-mindedness. The things he had relied on with total surety had proven to be illusory and weak, and things he had thought of as being fictive and simple-minded had proved to have unexpected power. He had been forced to recalibrate, to reorientate. As every sword-brother knew, the time of greatest weakness was during the correction of a defective technique. He had started to fight… and lose. He had faced Horus Aximand and had been made to withdraw. He had faced Khârn, whom he had not yet been able to bring himself to hate fully, and been beaten. He had even taken on a primarch. Had that been hubris? Or just frustration, a desperate bid to recover his now-so-elusive sense of superiority? If he had somehow done the impossible and bested Fulgrim, would that have finally banished the whispers of doubt? Probably not. The fault had never been external, he knew now – it had always been within him, slowly metastasising, becoming impassable the longer he ignored it. He had needed to hear Dorn’s words of release to understand it. They had, all of them, been fighting with one hand behind their backs, trying to hold on to a dream that had already died. The enemy was utterly changed now. They were physically stronger and morally intoxicated, eagerly drinking up gifts that should have been shunned as poison. And yet, those who remained loyal had tried to cling on to what they had been at the very start. They had still mouthed pieties about Unity and the Imperial Truth long after fealty to such virtues had become impossible. Once he grasped that, once he faced up to it, he had what he needed to remove the fetters in his mind. I no longer fight for the Imperium that was, he told himself. I fight for the Imperium as it will become.

The Lion had long held that the calibre of man was in reverse proportion to their need to make their worth known. It was a belief that had yet to be proven false.

And that was the strangest thing of all – to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion’s essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan’s than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them – they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.

The difference between gods and daemons largely depends upon where one is standing at the time.’ – the Primarch Lorgar

What intrigued Felix was how the primarch explained his actions. Whichever he said was most important to him depended on who he was speaking to. In this way, the primarch directed the energies of his followers according to their own prejudices without actually lying to them.

I never wanted to be a tyrant, thought the primarch. Perhaps my father did not wish to be so either. History has roles for us that cannot be denied. We are but pieces on the board of eternity.

This is your chance to speak,' he said to Vecchiaz. 'Use it well.' 'What are your terms?' Vecchiaz asked. 'There are none.' Another pause, a confused one this time. 'I don't understand.' 'I spoke clearly,' said Mortarion. 'I will repeat myself. There are no terms.' 'But we wish to surrender.' 'You can't.' 'But we no longer wish to fight you.' 'That was never your choice. I came to destroy you. What you do in response to that is up to you. It is no concern of mine.

He really is as mad as they say,’ said Gun. ‘Nobody sane would do this,’ agreed Elver. ‘They would,’ said Gun. ‘I have seen the same done, and worse, to further the survival of the Imperium. What is insane is not what was done, but why. This butchery is an indulgence. It serves no purpose. The monstrous can be justifiable, but if it cannot be righteous, then it is merely monstrous.

Primarch

My sons, the galaxy is burning. We all bear witness to a final truth – our way is not the way of the Imperium. You have never stood in the Emperor’s light. Never worn the Imperial eagle. And you never will. You shall stand in midnight clad, your claws forever red with the lifeblood of my father’s failed empire, warring through the centuries as the talons of a murdered god. Rise, my sons, and take your wrath across the stars, in my name. In my memory. Rise, my Night Lords.” — The Primarch Konrad Curze, at the final gathering of the VIIIth Legion.

With creation and function came peace. With mental fortitude came strength and the banishment of weakness.

The young man with the golden skin drops to one knee, silver tears sparkling on his flawless features like droplets of sacred oil. ‘I knew you’d come,’ he weeps the words. ‘I knew you’d come.’ The God in Gold offers his armoured hand to the kneeling young man. ‘I am the Emperor,’ he smiles, benevolence incarnate, glory radiating from him in a palpable aura that hurts the eyes of every onlooker. Thousands of people line the streets. Hundreds of priests, clad in the dove-grey of the Covenant’s ecclesiarchs, kneel with Lorgar before the coming of the God-Emperor. ‘I know who you are,’ the golden primarch says through his dignified tears. ‘I have dreamed of you for years, foreseeing this moment. Father, Emperor, my lord... We are the Covenant of Colchis, and we have won this world through your worship, for the glory of your name.

Like all his Legion, he enters combat in silence, letting his work speak for him. To invoke another, even the primarch, would be to admit weakness, a lack of self-sufficiency, to open the suspicion that there is luck or favour involved in these things.

Dorn smiled, cynically and without warmth. ‘You see, there’s your old problem. You never see any fault in Him. You never push back. You never stop, think, say to yourself – is that sensible?’ He pressed his great, calloused hands together. ‘And now you have this conundrum, the greatest of your existence. You were created to be the embodiment of His will, but we can no longer discover what that is. You are His voice, but He is silent. Can you think for yourself now, captain-general? That is what’s required.

Abandon the limitations of what you think is possible and you are left with a universe that is truly infinite. That realisation is the root of all power. Cage your mind with the possible and you have stolen your own future. - Rumination of the primarch Magnus the Red, recorded in the Athenaeum of Kalimakus

So much contempt for your own species." "Yes, contempt! If you had seen what I have seen, watched what a human may become when left alone in the dark, you would share it. You were lucky, Jaghatai. Your world was no Caliban. We tell you of Old Night and you barely believe us, but that is not how most places were. The lie is noble. It is there to protect, to guard, not to deceive, for they are not ready." I have heard this before. There were empires on my homeworld that offered freedom to their slave castes, but only when they were ready. That moment, strangely enough, never came. In the end, they had to take it for themselves, to die for it, and even then there were some who said the day had come too soon. The truth will come out. You won't be able to hold the blindfold in place, and once it slips, the fury of those you deceived will be limitless.

Now Guilliman was among the living once more, it was possible to ask him if all the words attributed to him were truly his. For the first few years, Guilliman had been in the habit of correcting his subordinates, insisting many of his supposed sayings were apocryphal, until he had given up in exasperation. He was simply not believed by most, for whom the primarch remained an ideal. They valued their preconceptions of him over the living evidence.

The search for perfection is a subtle drug. It draws the mind along circuitous routes, deeper and deeper into itself, until nothing can be seen except the ideal. Desire blinds one to purpose, and thus renders true perfection impossible.

Since no vistas were presenting themselves in this void, Magnus would conjure his own. If he was going to spend an eternity in this place, then he would be damned if he’d do it bored.

There can be no justice without fear, no fear without suffering.

« Ce que vous prétendez m’a tout l’air de sottises, un voile pudique jeté sur votre ignorance, se gaussa Perturabo. Je n’aime pas vos dieux, ce sont les ennemis de la raison. C’est ainsi que vous, les gens de foi, faites taire et exécuter ceux qui ne sont pas d’accord avec vous. Tout cela pour préserver votre confortable ignorance. » - Perturabo, "The Horus Heresy Primarchs : Perturabo, le marteau d'Olympia

You should never let someone else bear a burden you are afraid of, Lorgar. It has a habit of creating resentment.' - Primarch Fulgrim

The Emperor had allowed them to love Him, and to believe He loved them in return. He had not. His primarchs were weapons, that was all.

He had seen the ambitious and the proud seek to raise themselves above their kin, and in so doing corrupt themselves, make themselves into things of contempt. The true nobility did not need to prove itself. It simply was, a fact as indisputable as the orbit of planets and the majesty of stars.

Secrecy is our shield. It is how we defend lesser men from themselves.

I dislike secrecy intensely... It is deceit, and it deserves no place among the honest and honourable doctrines of Fair War. Secrets are volatile and unstable. They are never stored safely. When they emerge, the mere fact of them can damage the friends and brothers around us.’ - Primarch Dorn

I stand and I do not fall!" he shouted. "I stand and I do not fall!

When presented with a choice of beginnings, choose the one with meaning.

Allies on whom you could not rely were sometimes worse than no allies at all.

The truth is a weapon and a shield.’ - Primarch Sanguinius

There have always been those who would champion the merits of perception, instinct, or faith over Empirical Truth. But facts are immutable, regardless of who or what perceives them. Power will always belong to the one who knows them. To one accustomed to small triumphs, every victory is great. It is in my gift, and in yours, to see beyond.

Some men demand such pomp. They cannot accept the end of one era and the commencement of another without an occasion by which to mark it and give it meaning. Laurels must be given, honours and fair titles invented so that they may be bestowed upon favoured generals. Some men need recognition.' The shadows around the Emperor's throne deepened. But beneath the layers of obfuscation, deep within the myriad guises of that singularly unfathomable being, the Lion felt the Emperor behold His firstborn son. 'Some men,' the Emperor continued, 'do not.

Carthago delenda est. How many humans would know what those words meant? How many Terrans, whose world had birthed them, and how many on the thousands of newly populated and rediscovered orbs, all frantically developing and building and reaching upwards to a dimly understood but fantastically powerful future? Just a handful, maybe, who had access to lost books written in dead languages. History had a penchant for repeating itself, though, for rehearsing old patterns in ever grander circuits even if the participants had forgotten their origins.