Quotes from Max Brooks

From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper.

You can't blame anyone else, not the plan's architect, not your commanding officer, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

When fighting for your life, it may simply be too easy to flip the switch to "rock 'n' roll," no matter how wasteful and useless this might be.

How could those in power, especially in such a modern, enlightened age as ours, ignore the spread of a deadly disease until it reached plague proportions?

only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

It's a blessing and a curse, the human mind. We're the only creatures on Earth that can imagine our own death. But"—she held up my spear—"we can also imagine ways to prevent it.

What an insane waste! We could have worked together, traded supplies, technical expertise. Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come together as human bloody beings.

Those poor things. They sounded so scared and angry. And why wouldn't they? What else should they feel when some horrible person released them into an environment they weren't born for?

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.

Keep focused! Keep going!

Funny thing about the army, they always promise to teach you "marketable skills," but they never mention that, by far, there's nothing more marketable than knowing how to kill some people while keeping others from being killed.

Humans who believe they have outrun their undead pursuers might do well to remember the story of the tortoise and the hare, adding, of course, that in this instance the hare stands a good chance of being eaten alive.

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.

Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn't strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have?

Need. That's what makes a village. That's what we are now, and what holds us together is need. I won't help you if you don't help me. That is the social contract." I couldn't really process what she was saying.

They think they're at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They've never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing.

It's ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict.

Worry rose up on a bubble of realization.

We were taught that, even if we wore a uniform, that our first sworn duty was to our conscience, no matter what the consequences.

You spoiled children think that democracy is a God-given right! You expect it, you demand it! Well, now you're going to have a chance to practice it!

How do you effectively separate the infected from the others? How

Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

Its gold boots are, in fact, glowing." "Glowing with what?" "Can't say. Some sort of magic, I guess.

I was the first one to come up with a workable pitch: a vaccine, a real vaccine for rabies. Thank God there is no cure for rabies. A cure would make people buy it only if they thought they were infected. But a vaccine! That's preventative! People will keep taking that as long as they're afraid it's out there!