World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

by Max Brooks

But isn’t the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past?

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?

They used to have this saying, “every rich man’s house has a servant’s entrance.”

“Evaluation”…that’s what happens when it’s your own side. It’s only “interrogation” when it’s the enemy.

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

Isn’t that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body?

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

Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don’t, and anyone who says they do is full of shit. There are no rules, no scientific absolutes. You win, you lose, it’s a total crapshoot.

“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. That was my mantra. “Fear sells.”

It’s fear, dude, just fear and 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.

We were taught that, even if we wore a uniform, that our first sworn duty was to our conscience, no matter what the consequences.

You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

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

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.

Freedom isn’t just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it.

It’s a lot easier to blow up trains than to make them run on time. What is it that Mister Churchill used to say? “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

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

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.

Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come together as human bloody beings.

No, this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past.

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.