Max Brooks - World War Z (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now. Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as, say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world's citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons.

Max Brooks
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.

Max Brooks
Attack. When I first heard that word, my gut reaction was, "oh shit". Does that surprise you? Of course it does. You probably expected "the brass" to be just champing at that bit, all that blood and guts, "hold 'em by the nose while we kick 'em in the ass" crap. I don't know who created the stereotype hard-charging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves, by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns- the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays- to define our image to the rest of the country. Point is, that's the image of those in uniform, and it couldn't be further from the truth.

Max Brooks
They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don't teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they're trying to help you see the truth.

Max Brooks
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.

Max Brooks
You wanna know who lost World War Z? Whales. I guess they never really had a chance, not with several million hungry boat people and half the world's navies converted to fishing fleets. [...] So the next time someone tries to tell you about how the true losses of this war are "our innocence" or "part of our humanity"... Whatever, bro. Tell it to the whales.

Max Brooks
As soon as the report came in, [General Lang] sat down at his desk, signed a few final orders, addressed and sealed a letter to his family, then put a bullet through his brain. Bastard. I hate him now even more than I did on the way to Hamburg... he knew this was just the first step of a long war and we were going to need men like him to win it... 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 he'd done behind us. [Lang] couldn't do that. He couldn't shoulder the weight.

Max Brooks
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.

Max Brooks
No one would have expected [the escalation of nuclear hostilities], but then again, no one would have expected the dead to rise, now would they? Only one could have foreseen this, and I don't believe in him anymore.

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
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
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
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
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