Max Brooks Quotes - Page 2

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

We've been at peace about as long as e were at war.

Use your head; cut off theirs.

[...]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.

There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.

I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.

They didn't break me. I broke myself.

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.

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

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.

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

The highest distinction is service to others.

...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.

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

A true crisis. Class 3 outbreaks, more than any other, demonstrate the clear threat posed by the living dead. Zombies will number in the thousands, encompassing an area of several hundred miles.

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

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

I'm not a horror fan. I'm an anti-horror fan. I think horror fans feel deep down in the pit of their souls, they feel safe, and therefore bored. And therefore they want to be scared.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.

Whatever bro, tell it to the whales

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

Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.

I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.

I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.

I remember I used to come up to my teacher crying because I couldn't read. She would say: 'You can do this. You just don't want to do this.