Shift (Silo Trilogy #2)

by Hugh Howey

Here’s what I tell the newly elected: the truth is going to get out—it always does—but it’s going to blend in with all the lies.”

All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.

There was no planning for insanity. With enough revolutions and elections, enough transfers of power, eventually a madman would take the reins. It was inevitable.

A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”

“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.”

“And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.”

Often, it was the man with the most promises who got the chits, not the one who made people better.

humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going.

He remembered wondering how those people could have gone along with it,

He might be all alone in his world, but his was not the only world.

Donald smiled a yellowing smile and thought of the long history of madmen who remained in charge simply because no one would challenge them.

We have to show them death to keep them in. Otherwise, they’ll always want to see what’s over the rise.

He had been given a dose of power on this shift and could feel its allure. His discovery was that evil men arose from evil systems, and that any man had the potential to be perverted. Which was why some systems needed to come to an end.