Split Second Quotes

“He just said the powers that be had trouble making up their minds, the terrorists were even more despicable than civilians could comprehend, which most would be surprised was possible, and that he had lost his two closest friends.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But to suggest this was systemic, to suggest the Western forces were no better, and possibly worse, than the ruthless extremists, or that the West had brought this on themselves, made Blake’s blood boil. The Americans often went to great lengths, and even risked their own lives, to limit civilian casualties.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“the process of natural selection once ensured that the strongest, smartest, or fastest reproduced in the greatest numbers. But now, in the case of human society, with no natural predators to thin the herd, evolution didn’t reward those with the most intelligence, but simply those who reproduced the most.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“When you’re moving at the speed of light through space, you stop moving through time. It stops completely. It turns out that your speed through space, combined with your speed through time, always adds up to the speed of light.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Could he trust this man? He had thought he could trust Rourk, after all. And while Edgar Knight had always been a strange duck, he had trusted him as well. Until he learned otherwise—the hard way. Men were snakes. If God himself could be betrayed by an angel in Heaven—an angel named Satan, whom he was forced to cast out—certainly any man could be betrayed by any other man at any time.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“A narrator pointed out that the process of natural selection once ensured that the strongest, smartest, or fastest reproduced in the greatest numbers. But now, in the case of human society, with no natural predators to thin the herd, evolution didn’t reward those with the most intelligence, but simply those who reproduced the most.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And President Janney made sure this was a request they couldn’t refuse. So lucky us. We now have a polygraph system that is unbeatable. Today we get to find out, once and for all, who is ready to stab us in the back. Who is ready to drink the Kool-Aid that Edgar Knight is serving. Who wants to sabotage us and help this madman build a global government and take the helm.” “Assuming the mole is in our Inner Circle, of course,” added Joe Allen from beside him. “Right,” said Cargill. “Which I hope like hell isn’t the case. But either way, we’ll finally be confident we can trust each other, and we can move forward on that basis.” Cargill’s face hardened. “So none of you are leaving this room until all of you are tested. You should be honored to know that this will be the first use of the new test under field conditions.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“It never ceased to amaze him the power of the sex drive. No matter how intelligent and rational a person was otherwise, the sex drive was controlled by more primitive regions, and could turn the most brilliant man on Earth into an animal, flirting with disaster in pursuit of physical gratification, even when he knew in his rational mind that this was nothing but a trick played on him by his incorrigible limbic system.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“I’ve always loved bright people. But at the same time, I can’t stand intellectual snobs. You know, the type of people who look down their noses at anything mainstream, because they’re way too smart for that. The type who have to say everything as pretentiously as possible, using the most obscure vocabulary every chance they get.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Dr. Susan Schlesinger had wasted no time patching up his arm, stitching the wound as neatly as a seamstress, and hooking him up to an IV drip for meds, hydration, and nutrition. She had no idea what was really happening on the man-made island, but she was being paid a fortune not to display unnecessary curiosity, or complain about the lack of cell phone coverage or outgoing Internet. She had been told to care for every patient as though he or she were a head of state, and since she had only been there a week, and Rourk was her first patient, she had maintained a bedside vigil while he slept.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“cradle.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Resting on Nathan’s dresser was a toy commonly called Newton's”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“You reset the universe from the point of the change onward.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But the bottom line is this, once a timeline affects its own past, even though it erases itself in the process, the effect it had still remains.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“You step onto the Enterprise’s transporter pad. Your information, your pattern, is scanned into a computer. And then you’re destroyed, basically melted down. And a second later a copy of you is reconstituted on the planet below.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Knight wasn’t lying,” whispered Wexler. “You can type inside a Google search bar, and download files, but can’t send anything else through cyberspace, including passwords.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Bobbie Fischer was considered the greatest chess player who ever lived, and he ended up losing complete touch with reality. John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who developed game theory, was debilitated by paranoid schizophrenia. There are”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The longest tunnel ever constructed, the Delaware Aqueduct, had been completed in 1945, and ran eighty-five miles through solid rock, delivering half of the water used in New York City each day.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And while this might just be the cliché attraction that many students were fabled to feel toward their professors—although this seemed to work better for literature professors than for those teaching physics—he didn’t care.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Most cosmologists agree that dark matter and dark energy make up ninety-five percent of the universe. The parts we can detect, the hundreds of billions of galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, represent only five percent of the total.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The word dark is a misnomer, since it implies that lack of light is the problem, that if you could just shine a flashlight on dark matter you could see it. But this stuff can’t be detected by our current science. Period.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“So I hired consultants to block all communication off the island, from landlines, cells, or computers. Cells can’t get voice, text, e-mail, or Internet.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present. —Unknown “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.” —Omar Khayyam”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” ​—Carrie Snow”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“played across her face. “It’s like that famous quote, ‘If I would have had more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second