Sylvain Neuvel Quotes

- Love makes people do some crazy things.
- Nah. Love makes you get really drunk and punch through a wall.

If I grab a bunch of matter, anywhere, and I organize it in exactly the same way, I get…you. You, my friend, are a very complex, awe-inspiring configuration of matter. What you're made of isn't really important. Everything in the universe is made of the same thing. You're a configuration. Your essence, as you call it, is information. It doesn't matter where the material comes from. Do you think it matters when it comes from?

You will not die of pain, but you will never get used to it. Pain is unique in that it does not show habituation or neural adaptation, like smell, or touch.

You build a revolution on ideas. If the population doesn't buy your ideas, it means they're not ready, or you're wrong. There's this tendency for people to see any fight against the system as a fight for progress. As if the people before them couldn't possibly have gotten anything right. If you're using bombs instead of words, that means you're banking on people giving you what you want out of fear instead of reason. That's never a good sign.

We wouldn't really see anything at night, from this altitude, but it still felt good, like a layover in Paris. You never leave the airport, but even so, you're in Paris.

I was never really good at making friends. I liked reading; I liked walking in the woods; I liked being alone.

You were made for a particular purpose, but you can be anything you want. Anything, including that.

They'll protest war, but the everyday stuff, small injustices, they just let them slide. Friends making a fortune off government contracts, paying a hundred dollars for a pencil, that type of thing, people complain about it, everyone does, but they won't do a thing. I remember how floored I was when he told me it was a good thing, how we need a certain level of cynicism for society to function.

Stories are there to entertain, preserve history, or serve a societal purpose of some kind.

I thought something bad might have happened to him. It's nice to know he just doesn't want to talk to me.

Hey! Can you hear me? I'm talking to the American asshole who just told my daughter she was going to die. She says you put something inside her head, some sort of explosive. If that's true, you better hope that thing doesn't go off because if it does, you might as well kill yourself. I know what you're thinking. There's a good chance Moscow will do the same thing and kill me. There's always a possibility the Chinese or Koreans will kill me, but I wouldn't bet on that. You see, I'm not the easiest person to be with. I can be a bit of a dick sometimes, just ask my daughter. My point is if people keep me around, it's not because of my charming personality, it's because I have legs that bend the wrong way, and that's kind of useful if you also happen to have Themis. So on the off chance that I make it through this, I want you to listen to me very carefully. I don't give a shit who this robot belongs to an hour from now. I will fucking kill you. I will mow down whatever place you work at and the house you live in. I will kill everyone you've ever known, your high-school teacher, people you play softball with. I will march down Washington Avenue and turn DC into a fucking sandbox. I will end you and everything you hold dear. There. Will. Be. No United States when I'm done with you, and there is nothing, not a goddamn thing, you can do to stop me. Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME, MOTHERFUCKER? ANSWER ME!

I never understood why people use words they do not understand.

The goal of the values assessment is not the selection of model human beings, but of model citizens. This means the test should favour homogeneity, not atypical attitudes, no matter how commendable they may be.

If you fall in love with someone, there's a good chance the person won't love you back. Hatred, though, is usually mutual. If you despise someone, it's pretty much a given they're also not your biggest fan.

It's easier to be just one more soldier in a giant army than being the whole army by yourself.

Mr. Couture is not an American citizen. He is from Montreal. It is a large city, about the size of Boston, in that very large country just north of here. You may have heard of it. They play hockey. -

She has more issues than the New York Times.

Generally speaking, people tend not to question what they've been told was true. Scientists are no different; they've just been told a lot more things.

Can you keep an open mind? Are you willing to challenge what you know to be true?

I suppose no one ever thinks that they're close minded.

Deadwood sure isn't thriving, but it's still standing. And the landscape is breathtaking. It's sitting right on the edge of the Black Hills National Forest, with its eerie rock formations, beautiful pine forests, barren rock, canyons, and creeks. I can't think of a more beautiful place on Earth. I can understand why someone would want to build something there.

Family has a way of bringing out the worst in people. Every people.

The moral of the story is…Jeff is a moron. A baby axolotl can't fight a fish! You can't expect babies to do the things adults do. You can't expect anyone to do things they can't do. If you ask me to lift five hundred pounds, I can't. It doesn't matter how much I want to, how much conviction I put into it. It's just not something I can do. Maybe if I'd been training all my life, but not now, not tomorrow.

I came to realize that good and evil were out of my reach, that time was the only thing I had any control over. I could buy time, create intervals. I could not truly make the world a better place, but I could make part of it a better place for a short while.

People are compliant because they don't expect the system to be fair.

I was smart enough to know it was wrong, but not brave enough to stop them.

They're saying the system is rigged against them. I'm saying they're not even a part of it, not in a meaningful sense anyway. They've been sold an illusion of democracy. And they bought it! They really bought it. They don't want to get rid of the system. They're asking for more representation in it. They don't even realize that the whole thing is built to keep them out.

It does not matter. You train your soldiers to kill using video games. They blow enough people up on their computer and it becomes easier for them to kill with a real weapon. Why do you think your government funds so many war and terrorism movies? Hollywood does your dirty work for you. Had 9/11 happened twenty years earlier, the country would have been in chaos, but people have seen enough bad things on their television screen to prepare them for just about anything. We do not really need to talk about government conspiracies.

We're not the greatest thing in the universe, certainly not the smartest. Seems logical there'd be a great many things in it we can't comprehend.

Muslims are bad because they are, that's all. Why would you need a reason? It's one thing to let your child go blind because you read on Facebook that the measles vaccine would make him autistic, it's another to ship him off to a work camp because he inherited his grandmother's genes instead of Grandpa's. Our entire race is trying to lobotomize itself. It's as moronic and repulsive as someone cutting off their own legs.