The Best Trigun Quotes, and the Ones We Left Out

Trigun spends half its length pretending to be a comedy about a clown with a bounty, and the pretence is the technique: every pratfall is establishing a man who will humiliate himself rather than let anyone die. Nine verified lines follow, and a note on what is missing. The Wikiquote transcription of this series is unusually rough, so a number of the famous ones, including the love-and-peace shout, appear there only in damaged form. This site does not repair wording, so those are absent rather than tidied.

“Hey, whatever happened to thou shalt not kill?!” — Vash the Stampede

Aimed at a priest who has just shot someone, which is the argument the back half of the series is built out of. Neither position survives it, and the show declines to award the point.

“You had me kinda worried. I noticed you always smile and seem really friendly, but the way you smiled was so empty it hurt to watch you. You're hurting like crazy on the inside, yet you grin and bear it.” — Nicholas D. Wolfwood

The first person to read the protagonist correctly arrives dressed as a joke, dragging a bundle the size of a coffin. He recognises the performance because he is running one.

“Sometimes the answers just crash down from heaven.” — Nicholas D. Wolfwood

A priest's throwaway piety, and closer to a confession of method: his answers do not descend, they are delivered by the weapon he carries everywhere.

“Hey! That happened to be my can of pudding! And you wasted it. You should never get between people and their pudding.” — Milly Thompson

The comic line she gets quoted for, and the least of her. Milly is the only member of the cast who never adjusts her behaviour to fit the desert.

“Secondhand smoke is bad for the baby, darling.” — Milly Thompson

A domestic joke to a chain-smoking priest with no baby in evidence, and a claim on him: an insistence that he has a future worth being careful for.

“I failed. I failed to save someone again.” — Vash the Stampede

Nine words that needed twenty-three episodes of clowning to earn. The comedy was load-bearing all along.

“Even if you make a mistake, if you realize it was a mistake, you can always fix it.” — Vash the Stampede

Said near the end by a man who has failed more often than anyone watching can count, which is what makes it a position rather than a claim about the world.

“The humans treat you well? Did you have fun, dear brother?” — Millions Knives

Sarcasm, and sincere, which is worse. His entire case rests on humanity being unliveable among, and his brother is the only counter-evidence in existence.

“You're not a human being. You're a plant.” — Millions Knives

Five words that reorganise the series retroactively. Everything before it was the setup, which is why the reveal costs nothing to say.

Every line here sits with its commentary on the Trigun quote page, and the manga the anime diverges from is covered in our box set guide. How each quote on this site is checked is at our verification notes.