Upgrade Quotes

“What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Higher intelligence doesn't make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn't necessarily make you a good person.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Doesn’t feel like intelligence itself is the answer. It terrifies me to think of a world where we have all the same problems, a billion less friends, and everyone thinks they’re smart enough to be infallible.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Hunger, disease, war, warming- these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of who we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize. No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“You’re working off a flawed assumption. Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Being smart doesn't make people infallible, it just makes them more dangerous.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“The greatest threat to our species lies within us.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“All the existential threats to our existence live under the umbrella of climate change.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“If there’s a solution, it has to lie in reaching us from our ambivalence. Our apathy.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“We don't have an intelligence problem, we have a compassion problem”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“People with those kinds of ambitions—they aren’t like the rest of us. There’s a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade