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 pretense 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. The shout itself survives intact in Dark Horse's English edition of the manga, on the page that closes the original run, and Vash's page quotes it from there.

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

Aimed at a priest in the middle of a gunfight, 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

A traveling priest Vash has only just met reads the protagonist correctly. He recognizes the performance because he is running one.

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

His answer when Milly asks how he guessed she is the youngest of her siblings: an observation passed off as revelation, from a man who reads people closely and would rather credit heaven than explain himself.

“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.

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

A domestic joke to a priest with an unlit cigarette 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

Eight 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

Not a reveal: Legato has already told Vash he is not human, and the flashback to his childhood has shown it. What Knives adds is the category, and Vash concedes the fact without conceding anything that follows from it.

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.

For the print route, start with the original Trigun Deluxe, the edition recorded for the manga shout above, then continue with Trigun Maximum Deluxe 1–5. The buying catalog identifies the six hardcovers and their contents. The original and sequel have separate book numbering.

The original Trigun Deluxe card includes an opening analysis of selected publisher-authorized preview pages. It reads the wanted notice, the town’s ordinary violence and Vash’s request for help. The omitted pages and later chapters remain outside that reading.

The Maximum Deluxe 1 opening analysis reads selected licensed pages from the sequel hardcover, with its exact edition identity checked. Begin with the original Trigun before this restarted numbering.