BrainWeb Quotes

“He would become a career politician, the profession that attracted a higher percentage of fellow psychopaths than any other. And while there were a number of pathetic men and women who had chosen politics in a sincere effort to help others, on the whole, politicians were narcissistic backstabbers. Professional liars. Totally selfish and without conscience, most couldn’t care any less about others, although they could con anyone into believing they were the most compassionate people on Earth.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Politics, noun: [Poly ‘many’ + tics ‘blood-sucking parasites’]”             —Larry Hardiman”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“He would aim for the ultimate heights, as befitting someone of his superiority. He would become a career politician, the profession that attracted a higher percentage of fellow psychopaths than any other. And while there were a number of pathetic men and women who had chosen politics in a sincere effort to help others, on the whole, politicians were narcissistic backstabbers. Professional liars. Totally selfish and without conscience, most couldn’t care any less about others, although they could con anyone into believing they were the most compassionate people on Earth.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“There was a range of severity, with precious few on the Hannibal Lecter end of the spectrum. But fully one percent of the population could be classified as psychopathic, based on a number of criteria. Psychopaths were absolutely selfish, and absolutely ruthless. They had no conscience, empathy, or remorse. They were devoid of real emotion, but could fake it to manipulate others. They were cold-blooded, fearless, and cool under pressure. But they were also often charming and charismatic. Smooth talkers who were never embarrassed or self-conscious. Brilliant liars, manipulators, and con artists. And they were chillingly sane. They knew right from wrong: they just didn’t care. Fisher’s favorite description was encapsulated in a single sentence: psychopaths are predators who see all others as prey, and who feel as much compassion for others as wolves feel for sheep.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“He had known he was different from a very young age. He always seemed to know just how to get what he wanted. Other people, even his loving parents, meant nothing to him. They were just pawns, rubes, to be played as he saw fit. And he had always known the precise way to manipulate people to achieve his own ends. It was his genius. He could bully or charm with equal facility, and didn’t have a preference either way. He could construct elaborate webs of lies and deceit more effortlessly than other boys his age could construct buildings out of Legos.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“that human recall is poor and subject to error. SANDRA: Absolutely. And the advantages of having an external photographic memory are obvious. When my husband and I have different recollections, it would be great to be able to check the tape, as it were, to prove to him that I’m always right (smiling wryly). But the disadvantages are far greater. People will lose all faith in the accuracy of the memories they’ve accumulated before BrainWeb came along. They will quickly realize just how unreliable their memory really is. And baggage can hang around forever. Ill-advised words can be dredged up again and again, never forgotten. Every mistake potentially recorded for eternity. Most important, and most often discussed, is the complete lack of privacy. This has always been a major issue in the Internet and digital camera age, but BrainWeb amplifies this problem a thousand-fold.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Megan Emerson sat on a concrete bench that snaked into a long semicircle, one of several that resembled the bleachers for half of a theater-in-the-round, with palm trees and water features at the center where a stage might have been. Bright, colorful shops of every kind flowed around and beyond these concentric semicircles of concrete like a meandering river, and Megan decided she had rarely been in a mall as tranquil and adorable as the Bella Terra Shopping Center in Huntington Beach, California.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Psychopaths were absolutely selfish, and absolutely ruthless. They had no conscience, empathy, or remorse. They were devoid of real emotion, but could fake it to manipulate others. They were cold-blooded, fearless, and cool under pressure. But they were also often charming and charismatic. Smooth talkers who were never embarrassed or self-conscious. Brilliant liars, manipulators, and con artists. And they were chillingly sane. They knew right from wrong: they just didn’t care. Fisher’s favorite description was encapsulated in a single sentence: psychopaths are predators who see all others as prey, and who feel as much compassion for others as wolves feel for sheep.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Are you kidding?” said Girdler. “Politicians would sell their daughters to male prisons to hold on to power. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re the lowest form of life on the planet.” “Lower than pond scum?” asked Heather with a twinkle in her eye. “Comparing them to pond scum is an insult to pond scum,” said Girdler emphatically.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Sons of Islam everywhere, the jihad is a duty—to establish the rule of Allah on earth and to liberate your countries and yourselves from America’s domination and its Zionist allies. It is your battle—either victory or martyrdom.” ​—Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Right after high school, Fisher had already decided what he would do with his life. He would aim for the ultimate heights, as befitting someone of his superiority. He would become a career politician, the profession that attracted a higher percentage of fellow psychopaths than any other. And while there were a number of pathetic men and women who had chosen politics in a sincere effort to help others, on the whole, politicians were narcissistic backstabbers. Professional liars. Totally selfish and without conscience, most couldn’t care any less about others, although they could con anyone into believing they were the most compassionate people on Earth. There”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“His book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, came out back in 2011. (glancing down at her notes) “The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. The Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“In the second world war,” continued Fisher, “the allies conducted a study of planes returning from engagements in enemy territory. They determined the fuselages were the most exposed, because they were the most often hit. The vast majority of bullets and holes were found in the fuselages, whereas this was rarely the case when it came to the engines. So they decided to bolster the armor on the fuselages. Do you see their mistake?” asked Fisher. Engel just blinked for several seconds and finally shook his head. “They analyzed returning planes,” snapped Fisher, sneering condescendingly as though Engel were a complete idiot. “Of course they found most of the bullet holes in the fuselages. When the engines were shot, most of the time these planes never fucking returned. They were shot down. Get it? The planes whose fuselages were hit, and not their engines, were the only ones making it back to be studied.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“But they had learned that he was currently at the home he considered his primary residence, the La Jolla beach house, hosting meetings of the party faithful until eight p.m. It was probably not a coincidence that this was five o’clock in Washington,”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”             —Gore Vidal”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Then said the brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate, “To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late. And how can a man die better Than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“So if you were hoarding something worthless, it would be a slap on the wrist,” said Megan. “But since they found out you were hoarding something of incredible value, you’re screwed.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“My four-year-old niece has had a kids touchscreen tablet since she was old enough to drool. While I was there, I handed her a kids magazine. She had no idea what to do with it. She kept swiping the cover with her finger to try to scroll through additional pages. There was a part she wanted to see bigger, so she tried to touch it and splay out her fingertips to enlarge it.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Most people are sheep. Stupid and uninformed. And they don’t dig. They don’t think for themselves. They’ll trust a sincere voiceover and whatever the television tells them. But even if they dig, they have no intuition for statistics anyway. Even experts can be fooled.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“We’ve conditioned the public to believe women are only making a fraction of what men make for so long now, they’ll believe the lie before they believe the correction. This claim has been around for so long it’s created its own fucking reality.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Men choose high-paying fields like engineering, chemistry, and mining more often than women do. Women choose lower-paying fields like education and social work more often than men do. This accounts for most of the difference.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Women may make slightly less—maybe—but the seventy-seven cents to the dollar statistic is what men and women make, on average. It isn’t a comparison of the two sexes in the same jobs, with the same experience. It’s comparing total earnings across all jobs, which ends up being apples to oranges in many cases.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“So a patent is a pact between an inventor and society,” continued Altschuler. “In exchange for twenty years of exclusive use of an invention, the inventor is required to disclose the invention publicly, in writing. In enough detail so that others can duplicate it. And build upon it. You can still choose to keep an invention a trade secret, of course, but if you do, you don’t get protection. You basically take your chances that competitors won’t learn your secret.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Marc Fisher was a psychopath, plain and simple. And not only was he well aware of this fact, he celebrated it. And for good reason. Psychopaths were superior.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Good to know. Because proposing while we’re both naked is pretty pathetic. Bad form.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.” —Winston Churchill”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“Being inside Marc Fisher’s head was agony. The man had the outside appearance of a human being, but he was not. It was like taking a bite of a perfect, shiny apple to find nothing but squirming maggots inside. Hall”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. —Albert Camus”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb