Max Brooks Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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

Max Brooks
Of all the weapons discussed in this book, nothing is more important than your primary firearm. Keep it cleaned, keep it oiled, keep it loaded, keep it close. With a cool head, steady hand, and plenty of ammunition, one human is more than a match for an army of zombies.

Max Brooks
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.

Max Brooks
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.

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

Max Brooks
There's a little pond, in a small town in Poland, where they used to dump the ashes. The pond is still gray, even half a century later. I've heard it said that the holocaust had no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. I'd like to think that's not true. But if it is, then no one on Earth survived this war.

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

Max Brooks
[...]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.

Max Brooks
Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

Max Brooks
Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent thinking clearly is never time wasted.

Max Brooks
With so much protection, wouldn't one be able to wander among the undead ranks, taunting them at will with no danger of repercussion?

Max Brooks
I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.

Max Brooks
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.

Max Brooks
When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.

Max Brooks
Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

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

Max Brooks
The opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them. Only three-quarters.

Max Brooks
During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks.

Max Brooks
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.

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

Max Brooks
Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation.

Max Brooks
But there were alternative media outlets. Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted "The Dead Are Walking," the more most real Americans tuned them out.

Max Brooks
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

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

Max Brooks
Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.

Max Brooks
You can't blame anyone else,..., no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

Max Brooks
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.

Max Brooks
The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis.

Max Brooks
Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.

Max Brooks
If there's four Vietcong in a village with knives and punji sticks, we'll bring in a B-52. And I think, sometimes we need to learn to fight smarter instead of to fight richer. And this is what I mean, you know, education, "oh, education's expensive;" no it's not, books are cheap, (the) internet's cheap, we can fight smarter, we can learn. So, that's where resource-to-kill-ratio comes from.

Max Brooks