More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Max Brooks
Read between
July 31 - August 3, 2021
Selfless suffering feels good for short crusades, but as a way of life, it’s unsustainable.
Denial is an irrational dismissal of danger. Phobia is an irrational fear of one.
Monkey, you want to reign over all the animals, but look what a fool you are! —AESOP
It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.
All animals are competitive by nature and cooperate only under specific circumstances and for specific reasons, not because of a desire to be nice to one another. —FRANS DE WAAL, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.
“Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.”
“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.”
“People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.”
Violence, as unpleasant as it may seem, fulfills a necessary social function in chimpanzees. —ANDREW R. HALLORAN, The Song of the Ape: Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees
You know that’s how we got started, right? We were the first apes to start cracking bones. Way back in Africa, when the first skittish little scavengers climbed out of the trees. Using rocks to get at the marrow, realizing what a caloric jackpot meat was. A lot less energy to convert animal into animal than vegetable into animal. And the brain boost we got from that bonanza. Tools, language, cooperation. You can see the incentive for all the advances that make us human. More meat. Bigger brains. Bigger brains. More meat. I wonder what it looked like, when we first tasted fresh blood. What did
...more
“Like a tree in the forest, America doesn’t hear foreign suffering.”
“It’s a cruel joke, those formative years, when your brain learns the rules of the universe. Your childhood is spent being nurtured, protected, loved unconditionally while your adulthood is spent searching in vain for substitutes. Mate, government, God…”
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. —LEON C. MEGGINSON, professor of management and marketing at Louisiana State University, 1963
