Second Shift Quotes

“That word means something else, you know,' his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. 'It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. 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.”
He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.
“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,” Erskine added. “We can pick and choose the naturally mutated ones until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. He rattled them off in the cafeteria that day.” Erskine ticked his fingers as he counted. “Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. The bastard always was. It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“Generations of people staying close to home, there for each other, doing what they knew best, enjoying being a burden to each other.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. -Baruch Spinoza”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“If you think affordable DNA sequencers were a scare, or those cloning kits that made the rounds, imagine kids programming nanos in their basements, sharing their designs on the web. It would be worse than when they started printing those plastic guns in those cheap extruder kits. Who knows what they might try and target just for fun? It starts with the neighbor’s cat. The next weekend, someone wipes out an entire species by accident.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order

“Often, though, it was the man with the most promises who got the chits, not the one who made people better.”
― Hugh Howey, Second Shift: Order