Max Brooks > Quotes

“Use your head; cut off theirs.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent
thinking clearly is never time wasted.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“The 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." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don't need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

“The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

“There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“The dead walk among us.”
― Max Brooks

“Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Whatever bro, tell it to the whales”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Organize before they rise!”
― Max Brooks

“The monkey didn't help matters any. He was sitting on top of the microbus, just watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to me and say, 'This is the turning point of the war! We've finally stopped them! We're finally safe!' But instead his little penis popped out and he peed in my face.”
― 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, The Zombie Survival Guide

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

“Los monstruos que salían de sus tumbas no son nada comparados con los que llevamos dentro del corazón.”
― Max Brooks

“This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have...is what we want to be.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“[...]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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Unlike the escapee, your team of hunters will be out during the brightest, hottest, most excruciating part of the day. Make sure each hunter is well supplied with water and antisunstroke accessories.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead

“. . . 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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“El miedo, el miedo es la mercancía más valiosa del universo. Encended la televisión ¿Qué veis? ¿Gente vendiendo productos? NO. Gente vendiendo el miedo que tenéis de vivir sin sus productos.

El miedo vende”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“No sé si los grandes hombres son productos de tiempos difíciles, pero sé que pueden ser sus víctimas.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“The official report was a collection of cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without being influenced by the "human factor." But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themeslves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it?”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They'd robbed us of our confidence as the planet's dominant life form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they would be powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war's greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth's once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“...and that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude.
--Arthur Sinclair”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Marty chose, instead, to 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. There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. [...] I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“J'ignore si les grandes époques font les grands hommes, mais je sais qu'elles les tuent.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z