David Z

“She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species' history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them — not even its own reflection.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“The essential fallacy,' Ghoti picks up, 'is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.'
'On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Aren't you kind, Kanbaru said, [...] 'You must get told that often. That you're a good, kind person.'
Who wants to get told, and often, the kind of thing you tell someone who doesn't have a personality?”
― NisiOisiN, Bakemonogatari, Part 2: Monster Tale