Freedom™ Quotes

“Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you—not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“When people become more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Instead of adapting, their leaders clung to power and strove instead to be the last ones to starve to death. The Mayan civilization in South America did the same, and I expect our own civilization will do likewise.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“It all seems so clear now. Corporate intrusion into public institutions. Corporate domination of culture and media. It happened in plain view, with us cheering on their success as if it reflected well on us. As if it was us.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“They made a simple enough mistake. The same one we’re making. They founded their society on resource extraction, and in doing so, inflated their population beyond the carrying capacity of the land.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It’s a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We’re basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately reality has no advertising budget.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“You taught me everything I need to know; self-reliance, self-respect, community. Just don't be surprised if I actually put it to use.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“So what? So what if everyone cares? What does that do for us? The situation we’re in isn’t going to be solved by angry posts and best fucking wishes. Public outrage has never stopped these bastards.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“So you know when an AI—like Sobol—is pushing your buttons, and you can choose whether or not to listen.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“The people behind the modern global economy will prevent any meaningful change until it's too late.

But the question that needs to be answered is whether civilization's inability to adapt is a failure of leadership—or an unwillingness in humanity itself.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Storing data is so cheap it's essentially free, so data brokers record everything in the hopes that it will have value to someone. The data is aggregated by third parties, linked to individual identities, and sold like any other consumer data. It's not a conspiracy. It's an economy, but an economy these people know nothing about. They're tagged like sheep and have as much say in the matter as sheep.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Corporate intrusion into public institutions. Corporate domination of culture and media. It happened in plain view, with us cheering on their success as if it reflected well on us. As if it was us.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“You might not think it, but it was always the farmers who raised hell in this country. They worked for themselves, were self-reliant, and weren’t about to take shit from anybody. But then some clever bastard figured out how to make crops inedible. My family’s been doing industrial farming for forty years and all it produces is debt, pollution, and water shortages. It ruins the land and the people on it.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Don’t waste time being angry with the dead. They’ll never give you satisfaction.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“And I tell you that Americans are fucking ignorant about their freedom. They’re about as free as the Chinese. Except the Chinese don’t lie to themselves.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible
government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to
befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt
politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. —Theodore Roosevelt in 1906”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Further Reading You can learn more about the technologies and themes explored in Freedom™ through the following books: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Books When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, Beacon Press The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, Doubleday When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten, Kumarian Press & Berrett-Koehler Publishers The Transparent Society by David Brin, Basic Books Wired for War by P. W. Singer, Penguin Press The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio Brave New War by John Robb, John Wiley & Sons”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“When I realized what our world had become, how humanity had become cogs in its own machine, I resolved to do something terrible . . . perhaps one of the worse things ever done. To exploit the automation of our world in order to plant the seed of a new system is reckless and irresponsible. But I didn’t see any other way we would change. Or could change. “But”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Instead of adapting, their leaders clung to power and strove instead to be the last ones to starve to death. The Mayan civilization in South America did the same, and I expect our own civilization will do likewise. The people behind the modern global economy will prevent any meaningful change until it’s too late.” The avatar looked to Sebeck. “But the question that needs to be answered is whether civilization’s inability to adapt is a failure of leadership—or an unwillingness in humanity itself.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“For the first time she started understanding the appeal the Daemon must hold to a broad cross-section of people. It was a chance to start over. Daemon operatives had said it provided medical care. Retirement. Debt relief. No wonder. It was essentially a tax on corporations—one the corporate attorneys couldn’t dodge by moving their headquarters to Bermuda.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“It’s your life. You should be the hero of it. If it’s any consolation, I’m the hero of mine, too.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“the public doesn’t really decide anything now—they just select from the options they’re given.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“There are billions of lives at stake. Tinkering with the organization of human society—it never ends well.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“She smiled. “The first thing we do is stop planting corn.” “And plant what?” “What people need.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Just look at corn and soybeans, subsidized with taxpayer money—creating a market that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Why? So agribusiness firms have cheap inputs to make processed food. The taxpayers are basically subsidizing corporations to make crap, when we could have grown real food on our own.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™