Warhammer 40k Quotes

Everything is darkest," Xaphen mused, "before the dawn." "That, my brother, is an axiom that sounds immensely profound until you realize it's a lie.

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe. God was real, and he hated us.

You brothers-such a nest of rivalries. I warned him to make you sisters, that it would make things more civilized. He thought I was joking, I wasn't." - Malcador

The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal.

We do not know what our chances of survival are, so we fight as if they were zero. We do not know what we are facing, so we fight as if it was the dark gods themselves. No one will remember us now and we may never be buried beneath Titan, so we will build our own memorial here. The Chapter might lose us and the Imperium might never know we existed, but the Enemy — the Enemy will know. The Enemy will remember. We will hurt it so badly that it will never forget us until the stars burn out and the Emperor vanquishes it at the end of time. When Chaos is dying, its last thought will be of us. That is our memorial — carved into the heart of Chaos. We cannot lose, Grey Knights. We have already won." ~Justicar Alaric

There is no time to plan, there is no space to think. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only war.

Remember, my Jokers, a dropzone is like a woman. Land on her firmly, and make sure you have the vital parts located before you get going.’ Hurtado Bronzi

The sound of mechanized brutality that could only come from one species.

The gods demand entertainment. They demand trial and contest. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at each other's throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe's end

All of creation suffers, young ones. Only in accepting our own mortality can we make a difference. Only in bearing the burden of our failures can we find the strength to go on. Only in detachment from glory, or honour, or jealousy... from life itself can we hope to spare others from grief. We are Doom Eagles. And we are dead already. -- Librarian Secundus Thryn of the Doom Eagles

But they are many and he is alone. This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet.

There must come a moment when the soul knows: this far, and no further. But we are cursed never to hear that warning until it is too late.’ – attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy [M31]

What would you know of struggle, perfect son? When have you fought against the mutilation of your mind? When have you had to do anything other than tally compliance's and polish your armor? The people of your world named you "Great One". The people of mine called me slave. Which one of us landed on a paradise of civilization to be raised by a foster father, Roboute? Which one of us was given armies to lead after training in the halls of the Macraggian High Riders? Which one of us inherited a strong, cultured kingdom? And which one of us had to rise up against a kingdom with nothing but a horde of starving slaves? Which one of us was a child enslaved on a world of monsters, with his brain cut up by carving knives? Listen to your blue clad wretches yelling courage and honor, courage and honor, courage and honor! Do you even know the meaning of those words? Courage is fighting the kingdom which enslaves you, no matter that their armies outnumber yours by ten-thousand to one. You know nothing of courage! Honor is resisting a tyrant when all others suckle and grow fat on the hypocrisy he feeds them. You know nothing of honor!

Words and poetic sentiment did not change the truth of a thing. A kill was a kill, a life a life, and an executioner a murderer by any other name.

And in the end. It's just a man killing his son with a stone...then the galaxy burns

I asked myself in the aftermath of the Siege of Terra whether the so-called victory was worth the cost. Now I wonder if we won at all.

They’re so busy playing, they’ve taken their eyes off the board

Sometimes the threat is so grave, the worst of enemies must become the best of friends.

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium, for whom a thousand souls die every day, for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh – the stuff of which the Imperium is made. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of those times. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods.

The world goes quiet and warm. I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness. Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers. He tries to raise his sword. He is falling… He was… … running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers.

Victory slipped through our fingers the moment Horus chose to reach into the dark and something reached back. We sacrificed our ambitions on the altar of his hubris, and when he fell, he dragged us all down inexorably with him. And not just Horus- Fulgrim as well. And Angron. Magnus. Lorgar. The gods you worship are nothing save lies, hidden behind masks of folklore and superstition. Interdimensional cancers, their mindless hunger confused for sentience amongst the lost and the damned".

Claims of innocence mean nothing: they serve only to prove a foolish lack of caution.’ – Judge Traggat, Selected Sayings, Vol. III, Chapter IV

And in a sunless realm, the sun rose at last.

Presence of mind in all things, I counsel. Be aware of thyself before all else.

As I said, be careful from whom one gains knowledge and be aware of the price of its acquisition.

The first steps of damnation are always wrapped in the costume of piety.

If we cannot laugh at cruelty, then it has already bested us.

When inquisitors fall, in my experience, they do so very hard indeed.

Victory needs no explanation, defeat allows none.

Nothing better awaited her in the long night ahead.

Luck runs out, Blackmane. Aye. But not today, singer.

It takes a vast amount of self control to be this dangerous.

When one has no power, one will seek hope from any source.

It was going to be a long night.

He did not answer, nor did he watch as I left. He was seeing Sigismund again, dwelling on replies he could never speak to a brother he had once admired and who had died despising him.

The days of mankind are nearly done. For years I have been seeing it. All we can do while we are here is live. All any human ever has been able to do is live. That is all I tried to do.

The war is over, Diocletian. Win or lose, Horus has damned us all. Mankind will share in his ignorance until the last man or woman draws the species’ last breath. The warp will forever be a cancer in the heart of all humans. The Imperium may last a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. But it will fall, Diocletian. It will fall. The shining path is lost to us. Now we rage against the dying of the light.

Win or lose, the gods feast on our deeds. A man pets a stray, and his small pleasure in the act of kindness feeds Slaanesh. A woman strikes her crying child and that awful moment of elation she feels feeds Khorne. A Munitorum drone considers suicide. Nurgle grows fat on his despair. A merciful strategist devises a plan for bloodless victory, and Tzeentch is content. The Word Bearers think the gods crave worship. But the gods care for nothing save filling their bellies with our sorrows. Intentionally or not, we are all meat for the beast. Even you.

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.

We are but motes of dust, drifting in an endless sea; sparks that flare all too briefly. Our light does little to illuminate the fading universe, but it is in our nature to fight, to wrestle back the encroaching dark, to find a way. Thus, we open not our eyes, but our minds, and we are terrified by what it is we see.

This is not a foxhole. This is the rich earth of my world. Dirt I threw in handfuls on the coffins of troopers that came before me. Those who stood in the ranks on the bastion wall, lasgun in hand, And told the Eye it would not have our future. This is not a foxhole, this is my world. This is not a foxhole, it is my home. The place I have shared with my comrades, eating, laughing, A hole that does not feel empty, for we fill it with light and courage, And where I have seen them pass into the Emperor's light. This is not a foxhole, it is my home. This is not a foxhole, it is my fortress. It is home, world, a kasr I have dug with my own hands A legacy that was bequeathed to me, to meet the enemy blade first As we have always, and I will not leave it, not surrender it Not take one step back for I have dug my fortress, and will hold it. For this is not a foxhole, it is a grave.

We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear.

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.

Those things you dote on are no more human than the Neverborn in my flasks. They are golems of meat and muscle, no better than the Interex or the Laer. For all your talk, you have only made monsters. That is why the gods exalt you so... You are a fecund womb for outrages and that pleases them greatly.

I am Arsaces, Saha of the - I know who you are. You are a shadow of great warriors past. A mongrel, made out of battlefield leavings. Do not sully this moment by pretending to have a name that is worth remembering. Because I surely will not, come tomorrow.

The gods love you, Fabius. You delivered a Legion to them. You opened the door with your twisted ingenuity, in ways Erebus could not conceive. And you are still opening that door, every time your scalpel draws a red line across flesh. The universe is made of two parts--a knife and a stone. If you do not wield the one, you must lay upon the other. And you wield the knife very well indeed.

Why do you follow him? What can he offer you? Knowledge, child. There is no keener mind in the galaxy than that sour chunk of meat that occupies his skull. He has forgotten more about the inner workings of man and xenos alike than any Apothecary has ever known. I came to him to learn how to craft new and better contagions, so that Grandfather's blessings might be shared more freely. There are secret plagues from Old Night in these containers and virulent infections culled from crumbling bones of long dead aeldari. And with these raw materials and his aid, I have made wonders and horrors undreamt of by even the most glopsome of my brothers. Plagues that would devour even the rubbery flesh of Grandfather's children... Daemons are not susceptible to mortal plagues. No, they are not. And yet I have seen the results myself. That is what he offers me, child. In his shadow, I grow pleasingly feculent. And what does he get out of it? Were you not listening? Plagues, child. Swift plagues that can ravage entire systems at impossible rates. Oh, his mind is a thing of broken beauty. Even Abaddon cannot conceive of genocide on such a scale - it is not war to our Chief Apothecary, but simply...pest control. Imagine it. A great silence, falling all at once across a system. A sector. Every imperfect thing, snuffed out like a candle flame. And then... Ah, and then, a new beginning.

I have never really understood our gene-father's obsession with martial glory. It always seemed to me more efficient to simply eradicate our foes from orbit. Pound the earth flat and build over the ashes. And if they dig in? There are ways. Saboteurs, chemical weapons - there are hundreds of ways of dismantling a world and its population that do not involve orbital insertions and glorious advances into the teeth of enemy fire. Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours. And here I thought you were the clever one. I figured that out the day of my culling, when my family forced my cousins and me to fight for the honour of joining the Third. War as you describe it would be little more than pest control. What is there for the gods to feed on? Where is the desire for victory, the savagery, the hope and despair? Where is the entertainment? I believe you have made my point for me. No, you are not listening. On my pilgrimage, I learned much. Win or lose, the gods feast on our deeds. A man pets a stray, and his small pleasure in the kindness of the act feeds Slaanesh. A woman strikes her crying child, and that awful moment of elation she feels feeds Khorne. A Munitorum drone considers suicide. Nurgle grows fat on his despair. A merciful strategist devises a plan for bloodless victory, and Tzeentch is content. The Word Bearers believe the gods crave worship. But the gods care for nothing save filling their bellies with our sorrows. Intentionally or not, we are all meat for the beast. Even you, Fabius.

Do you remember Prospero? The world? Yes. When Russ and his curs burned it, a wealth of knowledge unequalled in the galaxy burned with it. I have always held that Magnus's greatest sin was not what he did to his sons or to his world, but that he allowed the Space Wolves to erase all that wisdom from the universe.

The discipline of the Third had once been without equal. Now, it had collapsed entirely, leaving only ambitious barbarism in its wake. Overeager savages scrabbling for influence among the ashes. Grudgingly, he included himself among their number.

You are not the disease. You are but the symptom. Mankind was on the cusp of greatness, Kasperos, and we yanked it away on the advice of a shared delusion.

Do not play me false, Fabius. I know deceit when I smell it, and the odour grows thick here. If you attempt to cheat me of my destiny, I will rip your ossified spine from your reeking carcass and beat you to death with it.

I am come, finally. The final curtain and the last song. And I will burn this half-world and clothe myself in its ashes before I am done. Children of the Emperor! Death to His foes!

We were created to guide mankind into the future. To oversee the birth of a new race. One which will outstrip even our accomplishments. We do not set the fire so that we might rule the ashes, my brothers...no, we set it so that the old might give way before the new. Take comfort, my brothers. It is a battle we cannot lose, for we have already won.

Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours.

You will not interfere with me? No. Well, I'm glad that's settled. Now I don't have to crack open your skull and claim the eldar did it.

The horde had the numbers to bring about the war’s end, while the defenders only possessed the numbers to delay it – but the losses were going to be grotesque. Ulienne didn’t want to die for the Emperor’s stubbornness. She wanted to live, to see the Warmaster’s ambitions come to fruition. She wanted the Imperium that Horus had promised. An empire for eternity. A kingdom of humanity that would never fall.

Say you release the Custodians from their vigil here. They say there are ten thousand of them. The enemy numbers in the billions. A lion is a poor hunter to set against so many jackals.

Even now, hard against the End of Time, when the death rattle of our species has become audible even to the thick-eared, they still grasp for a little more of the things we have always desired - coin, power, knowledge, gratification.

That's the great danger that condemns us - not daemon blades, but dumb ignorance. We've become a stupid race, glorying in the easy goals of anger and piety.

There was a dark irony to that. For so long we had benefitted from the esoteric properties of the Cadian pylons to keep our enemies restricted. Now, having burst his bonds, the Despoiler had turned the wreckage of his old cage into weapons.

The warp was the source of so much anguish for us, and yet its absence generated the greatest abhorrence of all. I suppose that is the tragedy of our kind- we are as moths to the candle, bound inextricably to the thing that destroys us.

In my experience, you mon-keigh make a great many claims when it comes to your own prowess, awarding yourselves title after title, your psyches awash with the hope that such posturing will intimidate your foes." "Undeniably true, though that seems harsh criticism from a species that attaches poetic nonsense like" The Storm of Silence" and "The Cry of the Wind" to its demigods, no?

Soldiers,' he made an insult of the word. 'Once we were crusaders Khayon, and now we're warriors, but we were never soldiers. Keep that foolishness to yourself.' I swallowed my argument, following his train of thought. It was not the first time legionaries have disagreed over those semantics, and it would be far from the last. Some believed soldiering came down to discipline, or fighting for a state or a leader rather than for yourself. Some believed warriorhood was a matter of heart that elevated them above a soldier's station, while others considered it a state of barbarity that dragged them beneath it. Some questions have no answers. No matter how seriously we took warfare, no matter how adamantly we clung to our disciplined roots as a Space Marine Legion, many of our number were ultimately the raiders and marauders that time had made them. For better or worse, we would never have the ironclad discipline of a Throne-loyal Adeptus Astartes force. Even back then, we had lost much of the discipline we had once possessed as Legions of the Great Crusade.

I did something that should not have been done and, by direct consequence of that decision, I sit here now and my world is destroyed, my oaths broken with my legacy one of misery and treachery.

For many years, I believed Him to be a god. I was instrumental in spreading the belief myself.' 'You still believe it'. 'I know what I know. A god or not, His power renders Him indistinguishable from divinity'.

He thinks about trying again, and second chances. Sometimes there just isn’t the opportunity or the willingness to make things better. Sometimes you can’t simply have another go. You make a choice, and it’s a bad one, and you’re left with it. No amount of trying again will fix it. Don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you, to cut you slack; you made a mistake you’ll have to live with.

The day will come, my dear, when your children's children stride the galactic rim as the kings and queens of all they survey. But first, you — we — must teach them how to survive, until that moment. In your generation, there were five hundred. Of them all, I kept only you and your closest siblings. The rest are scattered across the galaxy, burrowed into the flesh of a dying empire, so that they might best guide it to its well-deserved and long overdue grave. They, and their children, carry on my teachings into the dark. Generation upon generation, their strength breeding true. As mankind dies, so it nurtures its own replacement, all unknowing. But you are different. You and your kin are to be my hand on the throat of the future. For my brothers will not surrender to fate with dignity. Those who remain, after that final hour, will fight one another for the right to rule the ashes. And in that moment, you and yours shall assert yourselves, for the first time and the last. You will hunt angels, in the days to come, and make a new kingdom from their bones". ‘And where will you be?’ she asked softly. Fabius stepped back. ‘I imagine I will be first among the foundations, my dear.’ He smiled thinly. ‘There will be no place for me in the paradise to come.’ He laughed. Behind them, the entrance to the laboratorium whined open, and someone entered. Fabius ignored the newcomer, even as Igori stiffened. ‘But until then, I persist. Until my work is done.

I will give you NOTHING! Shall I tell you what I believe, Thagus?...I believe you are likewise trapped in the storm. I believe the Warp aided your pursuit of us, then cut you adrift in our wake, leaving you becalmed and with no idea why. I believe that the malignant essences we call Gods have brought us together in the heart of this storm to play out a game of kings and pawns, just to see where their favour should fall...I believe, most of all, that you are frightened of us. You fear us because despite your raving speeches that we are betraying the Legions, and despite your petty crusades to destroy us, we not only survive, but THRIVE. We grow with every conflict. The icons of the failed Legions are sheared from ever more suits of armour, and the colours of shame are eclipsed in numbers no other warband can match. You fear that we are right and you are wrong. You fear us, more than any other reason, because you had to chase us. Because we were here first. Because we are the ones on the verge of breaking free, despite all your attempts in these last decades to hinder us. We have been working towards this fate, while you have done nothing but seek to stop us. We've fought for true unity, all brothers beneath the black banner, while you've fought against it in the guise of preserving the old, failed ways. We, Thagus, have acted. You have reacted. And here we stand at our prison's edge. Even now you have no answers to give your men. Instead, you force this meeting with us, praying you can glean insight into our plans and scavenge victory through threats. You'll lose this war, Thagus. You'll lose because you desire the Gods' favour and you fear it falling upon anyone else.

You don’t need to hear to listen to the truth.

To face one’s past is to face one’s future.

She had no idea what came next. And for once, the idea was pleasing.

The universe has never seen a living being who loathed being alive as much as my father. His life was broken in seeking to prove how humanity could be controlled, and his death was a sacrifice to prove that the species was ultimately wretched.

Do not underestimate the evils men will do for a small advantage.

‘If you have nothing, then no one can steal from you. Desire nothing and nothing can tempt you. Lose everything and you can take anything.’ - Aphorism of the Nepenthe Collegium of the Scholastia Psykana

My last mission ended with me drifting for a hundred years in a warp storm.’ ‘Well, we all have our moments.

He charged headlong into dangerous territory. He should have stopped, but anger propelled him.

He was posturing. So much posturing. Humans never tired of it.

One mind is sometimes all it takes to change fate,’ Ulthran said defiantly.

I cannot allow my own convictions to get in the way of truth, for only in knowing the truth can victory be secured.

I don't care if every man jack of them forgets his own mother's name and wets himself, they must still know how to hold a line, fire and reload, adore the Emperor and respond to orders. - Inquisitor Eisenhorn

I’m not sure you even know where your truths end and your lies begin.

He took a deep breath. He felt the fear and wrapped his heart around it. He let it inhabit his whole being until there was nothing left of him. He looked up.

Iron does not take a single form whilst forsaking all others. The strength of iron is in its flexibility, its capacity to adapt to suit any situation.

Age is a matter of perspective.

They do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery./b>

To break with ritual is to break with faith, brother...

A single, simple longing was enough to damn him.

To have survived in a place like this, you must have light on your side.

Following the light requires great strength of will.

What is memory but the fashioning of a deep and personal fiction? In memory, we shape the world around ourselves, as if to prove our own existence, to demonstrate the mark we have left upon the universe. We become heralds of something better; the guiding light by which we believe all others might navigate. This, then, is the comfort we award ourselves for the act of living, for to comprehend the truth – that the universe is cold and ambivalent at best, and at worst despises our very existence – is to contemplate madness. So it is that we grow to love the lie.

They come to us because they’re jealous, lustful, or their minds have gone. I had a man tell my processors his own mother had fallen to the dark. He wanted to take her hab-unit. Three metres square, stinking like a grox-pen, underground, unheated. But it would have been his.

The things I have seen and done…

All is deceit. Nothing wears a true face or uses a true name. Nothing is as it appears to be, as if the whole universe were busily playing out a function, ‘guised in cunning. The mad are sane, the blind can see, the sane are otherwise demented, good is evil, and up, for all I care, is down.

Heretics are the only ones worth trusting,’ the voice said, ‘for they have everything to gain and everything to lose.

I have used up my days believing I serve the Throne above all, but this is the filth I am dragged into.’ ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘That’s something I might have said of my own life. Nothing wears an honest face. Those we admire disappoint us, or betray us. What truth may be found is uglier and more cruel than our worst expectations.

The galaxy was in flames and crowded with pyromaniacs eager to claim possession of the ashes. Bile had no interest in the conflagration, its cause or celebrants. Let the galaxy burn. From its ashes would rise a new future. One created by him.

Each man is a spark in the darkness. Would that we all burn as bright.

The promise of mutually assured destruction had a way of calming even the fiercest hearts.

The ramparts were infinite. So was his will.