Quotes from Brad Thor

Even one death is horrible.

Someone putting down $25 of his or her hard-earned money to buy my product, then doing it again because they felt the payoff was worth it. That's as good as it gets for an author.

Al Qaeda doesn't abide by the Geneva Conventions, so in my opinion, they should not be afforded the protections of them.

I really believe that a writer is someone who has trained their mind to misbehave.

From the political angle, I'm trying to be apolitical if you will. I mean people say, 'Are you a red state or blue state?', I say, 'I'm purple.' I think there are great ideas on both sides of the aisle and neither side has cornered the market.

I had been fascinated with Islam since college - particularly how it could inspire such fervor in our modern age and move a significant number of its followers to horrific acts of violence. That invisible hand moved me to study more and more about Islam.

I wanted to live the life my characters were living, so I rented a yacht and sailed from Naples to Capri before taking a helicopter back. Got to write the whole thing off as research on my taxes.

He was coming in way too fast. He'd had no choice. The wind had changed, and coming in quickly was the only way to keep up with the speed of the enormous vessel.

Al Qaeda" didn't translate to "the base," as most Western media outlets had so ignorantly reported, but rather, "the database." It referred to the original computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with the help of the CIA to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

Malthus believed that a Utopian society could never be achieved as long as the world's population was allowed to continue to grow unchecked. The only way to protect the earth and improve the existence of mankind was to have less of mankind—something he believed Mother Nature would eventually deliver in the form of widespread famine and disease.

The funny thing about believing you can do no wrong is that you quickly begin doing nothing but wrong.

For instance," said Alan, "we're now learning that the smallpox pandemics of the Middle Ages, not the plague, mind you, but smallpox, left generations of people with a rare genetic defect that protects them against infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. We estimate that approximately one percent of people descended from northern Europeans are virtually immune to HIV infection.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. — Alan Whitcomb

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. —George Orwell

In America, only opportunity is assured, not outcomes. Anyone who promises otherwise is acting contrary to the values upon which our Republic was founded.

Anything that grows is, by definition, alive. Washington, D.C. was no exception. As a living organism, the Federal Government's number one job was self-preservation. Any threat to its existence had to be dealt with.

My point is that bureaucrats—like everyone else—have a mind-set. The longer they work for government, the more they believe government is the answer, and the less they trust the everyday citizen. In fact, they begin to believe that certain groups of citizens are the root of the nation's problems. They see them as a threat. If those citizens can be brought to heel, the bureaucracy sees itself as doing the citizenry at large a greater good, actually making their lives better.

Aerotechnik Super Vivat Icarus motorgliders had an enormous wingspan and looked like a typical side-by-side pilot/passenger configuration sailplane that had been crossed with a small Cessna single-prop aircraft.

People who took themselves too seriously not only were no fun, but could also be very dangerous.

He had the three ingredients to happiness right in the palm of his hand and he knew it—something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.

The only people who might hope to survive were those who had exercised some degree of caution and had prepared in advance.

we still live in a world where might makes right. The moment we lose sight of that rule and start shrinking from our duties as a nation, is when we'll all need to begin trading in our minivans and baseball mitts for prayer rugs and Arabic lessons.

The worth of a culture, in his opinion, could be boiled down to one thing—how well that culture took care of its weakest members, particularly its women and children.

The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn't win by thinking inside the box and following someone else's rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.