Max Brooks Quotes

After all we'd been through, we still couldn't take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other's throats. ~ Max Brooks

Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down. ~ Max Brooks

Knowledge is only part of the fight for survival. ~ Max Brooks

What are you seeing? people selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their product ~ Max Brooks

I know I come off as a little too optimistic, because I'm sure that as soon as things really get back to "normal," once our kids or grandkids grow up in a peaceful and comfortable world, they'll probably go right back to being as selfish and narrow-minded and generally shitty to one another as we were. But then again, can what we all went through really just go away? I once heard an African proverb, "One cannot cross a river without getting wet." I'd like to believe that. ~ Max Brooks

I think Americans are at our best when we recover from a crisis. We've suffered some blows that other countries would have never recovered from. ~ Max Brooks

Zombies have no memories of their former life. You wont see the undead trying to wash windows or do your taxes. All they know how to do is swarm and feed. ~ Max Brooks

If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse. ~ Max Brooks

[…] mines don't work that way. They don't blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That's what they're designed for, not to kill people, but to wound 'em so the army will spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send 'em home in a wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see 'em that maybe supporting this war isn't such a good idea. ~ Max Brooks

There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope. ~ Max Brooks

Isn't that…


A lie? It's okay. You can say it. Yes, they were lies and sometimes that's not a bad thing. Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used. The lies our government told us before the war, the ones that were supposed to keep us happy and blind, those were the ones that burned, because they prevented us from doing what had to be done. However, by the time I made Avalon, everyone was already doing everything they could possibly do to survive. The lies of the past were long gone and now the truth was everywhere, shambling down their streets, crashing through their doors, clawing at their throats. The truth was that no matter what we did, chances were most of us, if not all of us, were never going to see the future. The truth was that we were standing at what might be the twilight of our species and that truth was freezing a hundred people to death every night. They needed something to keep them warm. And so I lied, and so did the president, and every doctor and priest, every platoon leader and every parent. "We're going to be okay." That was our message. ~ Max Brooks

You ever hear about that experiment an American journalist did in Moscow in the 1970s? He just lined up at some building, nothing special about it, just a random door. Sure enough, someone got in line behind him, then a couple more, and before you knew it, they were backed up around the block. No one asked what the line was for. They just assumed it was worth it. I can't say if that story was true. Maybe it's an urban legend, or a cold war myth. Who knows? ~ Max Brooks

We need a stable government, fast!" I kept saying. "Elections are great in principle but this is no time for high ideals."


The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training…he said to me, "This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…[struggling to remember]…all we have is what we want to be." You see what he was saying. Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn't strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one would mean the end of America. They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him. ~ Max Brooks

Looking for love on the internet is like Janet Leigh asking Norman Bates if he likes her body. ~ Max Brooks

Armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one. ~ Max Brooks

I'm addicted to murder, and that's about the nicest way I can put it. You might say that's not technically true, that since they're already dead I'm not really killing. Horseshit; it's murder, and it's a rush like nothing else. Sure, ~ Max Brooks

If you can fight,fight,help each other, be prepared for anything. ~ Max Brooks

I think the general anxiety of the 1960s - '70s spawned our interest in the living dead. When people worry about the end of their world, they need a safe vessel for all their fears. Zombies provide that vessel because they're 'safe.' ~ Max Brooks

The majority of them simply melted into the host country's underbelly.
The low-income areas?
If that's what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge. How else could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos? ~ Max Brooks

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget. ~ Max Brooks

Show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay. ~ Max Brooks

I know "professional" historians like to talk about how Yonkers represented a "catastrophic failure of the modern military apparatus," how it proved the old adage that armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one. Personally, I think that's a big 'ole sack of it. Sure, we were unprepared, our tools, our training, everything I just talked about, all one class-A, gold-standard clusterfuck, but the weapon that really failed wasn't something that rolled off an assembly line. It's as old as…I don't know, I guess as old as war. It's fear, dude, just fear and you don't have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn't about killing or even hurting the other guy, it's about scaring him enough to call it a day. Break their spirit, that's what every successful army goes for, from tribal face paint to the "blitzkrieg" to…what did we call the first round of Gulf War Two, "Shock and Awe"? Perfect name, "Shock and Awe"! But what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't! That's what happened that day outside New York City, that's the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war. The fact that we couldn't shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our faces and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They're not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid! ~ Max Brooks

You can't blame anyone else ... You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight. - Philip Adler ~ Max Brooks

Only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe. ~ Max Brooks

PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, TENNESSEE ~ Max Brooks

That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting one war, we're always preparing for the next one. ~ Max Brooks

I wanted to serve. It was Desert Storm. I thought, 'I was a rich kid, and America's been good to me.' ~ Max Brooks

Funny thing about the army, they always promise to teach you "marketable skills," but they never mention that, by far, there's nothing more marketable than knowing how to kill some people while keeping others from being killed. ~ Max Brooks

The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never hand that kind of funding. ~ Max Brooks

It is my fault, and the fault of everyone of my generation. I wonder what the future generations will say about us. My grandparents suffered through the Depression, World War II, then came home to build the greatest middle class in human history. Lord knows they weren't perfect, but they sure came closest to the American dream. Then my parents' generation came along and f***ed it all up - the baby boomers, the "me" generation. And then you got us. Yeah, we stopped the Zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. 'Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess. ~ Max Brooks

We lost a hell of a lot more than just people when we abandoned them to the dead. ~ Max Brooks

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist. ~ Max Brooks

In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply "dropped the ball." We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing's true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it's necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor's nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth. ~ Max Brooks

When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no. ~ Max Brooks

Personally, I could have cared less. ~ Max Brooks

Are you kidding? That's exactly why I hate him! He knew that this was just the first step of a long war and we were going to need men like him to help win it. Fucking coward. Remember what I said about being beholden to your conscience? You can't blame anyone else, not the plan's architect, not your commanding officer, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight. ~ Max Brooks

It's ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict. ~ Max Brooks

The monkey didn't help matters any. He was sitting on top of the microbus, just watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to me and say, 'This is the turning point of the war! We've finally stopped them! We're finally safe!' But instead his little penis popped out and he peed in my face. ~ Max Brooks

But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? ~ Max Brooks

This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have ... is what we want to be. ~ Max Brooks

Unlike the escapee, your team of hunters will be out during the brightest, hottest, most excruciating part of the day. Make sure each hunter is well supplied with water and antisunstroke accessories. ~ Max Brooks

Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack. ~ Max Brooks

I'm not going to say the war was a good thing. I'm not that much of a sick fuck, but you've got to admit that it did bring people together. ~ Max Brooks

America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say "perception" because America is a very all-or-nothing society ... We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn't uncontested, it was positively devastating. ~ Max Brooks

I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.' ~ Max Brooks

[ ... ]you don't have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn't about killing or even hurting the other guy, it's about scaring him enough to call it a day. ~ Max Brooks

Whatever bro, tell it to the whales ~ Max Brooks

So you never really tried to solve the problem.
Oh, c'mon. Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity. You can't stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least won't leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.
What does that mean?
C'mon ...
Seriously. What does that mean?
Fine, whatever, "Mister Smith goes to motherfuckin' Washington," it means that, in politics, you focus on the needs of your power base. Keep them happy, and they keep you in office. ~ Max Brooks

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don't need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on. ~ Max Brooks

Jesus, you'd think the Black Death was sweeping the globe every three months or so ... ebola, SARS, avian flu. You know how many people made money on those scares? Shit, I made my first million on useless antiradiation pills during dirty bomb scares. ~ Max Brooks

North Koreans were indoctrinated from birth to believe that their lives were meaningless, that they existed only to serve the State, the Revolution, and the Great Leader. ~ Max Brooks

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used. ~ Max Brooks

The official report was a collection of cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without being influenced by the "human factor." But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themeslves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? ~ Max Brooks

Freedom isn't just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it. ~ Max Brooks

Americans are an honest people, we expect a fair deal. I know that a lot of other cultures used to think that was naive and even childish, but it's one of our most sacred principles. ~ Max Brooks

When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was 'Hunt for Red October' by Tom Clancy. ~ Max Brooks

With so much protection, wouldn't one be able to wander among the undead ranks, taunting them at will with no danger of repercussion? ~ Max Brooks

So I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It's like reading the last page of a book ... your imagination just naturally spinning. And that's when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you. ~ Max Brooks

As stated before, in Western - particularly American - culture, there is the myth of the individual superbeing. One man or woman, well-armed and highly skilled, with nerves of steel, can conquer the world. In truth, anyone believing this should simply strip naked, holler for the undead, then lay down on a silver platter. ~ Max Brooks

You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. ~ Max Brooks

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts ~ Max Brooks

Zombies will try to scale any surface no matter how unfeasable or even impossible. In all but the easiest situations, these attempts have met with failure. Even in the case of ladders, when simple hand-over-hand coordination is required, only one in four zombies will succeed. ~ Max Brooks

Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent
thinking clearly is never time wasted. ~ Max Brooks

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe ... Turn on the TV ... What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products. ~ Max Brooks

You've heard the expression "total war"; it's pretty common throughout human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared "total war" against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it's just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young? What about when you're sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a "dump for victory"? That's the first reason total war is impossible for humans. The second is that all nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are willing to sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the population, but that population as a whole will eventually reach its maximum emotional and physiological breaking point. The Japanese reached theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might have reached theirs if we'd dropped a couple more, 2 but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke before it came to that. That is the nature of human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past its limit of endurance, and no matter h ~ Max Brooks

Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted. ~ Max Brooks

Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you. ~ Max Brooks

There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero. ~ Max Brooks

From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and They told me to do it! It's their fault, not mine. ~ Max Brooks

We've been at peace about as long as e were at war. ~ Max Brooks

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do. ~ Max Brooks

You assume things, like whatever country has more firepower wins the wars, and that's actually not true at all. ~ Max Brooks

The dead walk among us. ~ Max Brooks

They didn't break me. I broke myself. ~ Max Brooks

the only Cuba I could ever imagine. That is, until the dead began to rise. ~ Max Brooks

Of all the weapons discussed in this book, nothing is more important than your primary firearm. Keep it cleaned, keep it oiled, keep it loaded, keep it close. With a cool head, steady hand, and plenty of ammunition, one human is more than a match for an army of zombies. ~ Max Brooks

[He] believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again, "imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity. ~ Max Brooks

The first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality ~ Max Brooks

I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them. ~ Max Brooks

There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts. ~ Max Brooks

Why would I want to get depressed by watching TV? I could do that just by stepping on the scale every morning. ~ Max Brooks

The bottom line is I'm a slow zombie guy - I'm always a slow zombie guy but I also know I'm in the minority. ~ Max Brooks

But no matter what happens to the surviving humans, there will always be the walking dead. ~ Max Brooks

Zombies let us explore notions of the apocalypse - no water, food, medical care, the government imploding - while letting us sleep at night. ~ Max Brooks

When I read Frank Miller's 'The Dark Knight Returns', I think it's a wonderful record of the Reagan era. I think it's amazing. This is the time I lived in. ~ Max Brooks

When this engineer, Sergeant Mukherjee, grabbed me by the arm ~ Max Brooks

[Kwang Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and incarcerated without formal ~ Max Brooks

History has proven that a well-trained individual, with nothing but a rock, has a better chance of survival than a novice with the latest technological marvel. ~ Max Brooks

During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns
such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the
emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of
zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This
obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an
executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks. ~ Max Brooks

When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story. ~ Max Brooks

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character. ~ Mel Brooks

A true crisis. Class 3 outbreaks, more than any other, demonstrate the clear threat posed by the living dead. Zombies will number in the thousands, encompassing an area of several hundred miles. ~ Max Brooks

What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment. ~ Max Brooks

You can't stop the rain. All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won't leak, or at least won't leak on the people who are gonna vote for you. ~ Max Brooks

My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor. ~ Max Brooks

Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity. ~ Max Brooks

Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted "The Dead Are Walking," the more most real Americans tuned them out.


So, let me see if I understand your position.


The administration's position.


The administration's position, which is that you gave this problem the amount of attention that you thought it deserved.


Right.


Given that at any time, government always has a lot on its plate, and especially at this time because another public scare was the last thing the American people wanted.


Yep.


So you figured that the threat was small enough to be "managed" by both the Alpha teams abroad and some additional law enforcement training at home.


You got it.


Even though you'd received warnings to the contrary, that it could never just be woven into the fabric of public life and that it actually was a global catastrophe in the making.


[Mister Carlson pauses, shoots me an angry look, then heaves a shovelful of "fuel" into his cart.]


Grow up. ~ Max Brooks

I think the fascination with zombies is that they don't obey the rules of monsters. The first rule of monsters is that you have to go find them. You have to make a conscious choice to go to the swamp or the desert or the abandoned summer camp. ~ Max Brooks

Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn't strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have? ~ Max Brooks

I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in. ~ Max Brooks