Max Brooks

“His last words: "On ne passé pas!”

“To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.”

“There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.”

“That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting one war, we're always preparing for the next one.”

“The highest distinction is service to others.”

“...So I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It's like reading the last page of a book... your imagination just naturally spinning. And that's when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you.”

“It was me, only me. Self-contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured.”

“The book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.”

“[He] believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again, "imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity.”

“...because I'm sure that as soon as things really get back to "normal," once our kids or grandkids grow up in a peaceful and comfortable world, they'll probably go right back to being as selfish and narrow-minded and generally shitty to one another as we were.”

“And then you got us. Yeah, we stopped the zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. "Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.”

“After all we'd been through, we still couldn't take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other's throats.”

“Because Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.”

“From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and "They told me to do it! It's their fault, not mine.”

“Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”

“Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe...Turn on the TV...What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.”

“I can't tell you if this is the right path; the future is too mountainous to see to far ahead. ... Only 'the gods' know what awaits us at its end.”

“The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never hand that kind of funding.”

“Joy, sadness, confidence, anxiety, love, hatred, fear-all of these feelings and thousands more that make up the human "heart" are as useless to the living dead as the organ of the same name. Who knows if this is humanity's greatest weakness or strength? The debate continues, and probably will forever.”

“But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for personal accounts of individuals not so different from themselves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kinds of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it?”

“America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.”

“This space station [Yang Liwei] was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Station. If those charges were to detonate, the debris...any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a "Scorched Space" policy. "If we can't have it, neither can anyone else.”

“Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.”

“You can't blame anyone else... You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight." - Philip Adler”

“But no matter what happens to the surviving humans, there will always be the walking dead.”

“Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.”

“We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z”

“They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. [...] I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.”

“The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They'd robbed us of our confidence as the planet's dominant life form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they would be powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war's greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth's once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.”

“They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls.”

“[...]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.”

“This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have...is what we want to be.”

“1. Organize before they rise!2. They feel no fear, why should you?3. Use your head: cut off theirs.4. Blades don't need reloading.5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!9. No place is safe, only safer.10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.”

“. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay.”

“There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”

“...and that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude.--Arthur Sinclair”

“If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.”

“The monkey didn't help matters any. He was sitting on top of the microbus, just watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to me and say, 'This is the turning point of the war! We've finally stopped them! We're finally safe!' But instead his little penis popped out and he peed in my face.”

“If you believe you can accomplish everything by "cramming" at the eleventh hour, by all means, don't lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining”

“Hooking on scuba gear and blindly diving into zombie-infested water is a wonderful way to mix the two childhood terrors of being eaten and drowning.”

“Unlike the escapee, your team of hunters will be out during the brightest, hottest, most excruciating part of the day. Make sure each hunter is well supplied with water and antisunstroke accessories.”

“Zombies will try to scale any surface no matter how unfeasable or even impossible. In all but the easiest situations, these attempts have met with failure. Even in the case of ladders, when simple hand-over-hand coordination is required, only one in four zombies will succeed.”

“Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.”

“Whatever bro, tell it to the whales”

“Los monstruos que salían de sus tumbas no son nada comparados con los que llevamos dentro del corazón.”

“No sé si los grandes hombres son productos de tiempos difíciles, pero sé que pueden ser sus víctimas.”

“No tienes que ser el puto Sun Tzu para saber que la verdadera batalla no consiste en matar, ni siquiera en herir al otro, sino en asustarlos lo suficiente para que lo deje.”

“El miedo, el miedo es la mercancía más valiosa del universo. Encended la televisión ¿Qué veis? ¿Gente vendiendo productos? NO. Gente vendiendo el miedo que tenéis de vivir sin sus productos.El miedo vende”

“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”

“Fear sells.”