Max Brooks citations

Page 2

“C'est beaucoup plus facile de faire sauter les trains que de les faire arriver à l'heure.”

“À l'époque, la meilleure façon de rendre hommage à notre cher guide Mao, c'était de caresser délicatement son visage en palpant des liasses de billets de cent yuans.”

“On a des centaines de partis politiques et plus de groupes d'influence que de grains de sable sur nos plages. On a des grèves, des émeutes, des manifestations. Presque tous les jours. On comprend mieux pourquoi le Che s'est fait la malle après la révolution. C'est beaucoup plus facile de faire sauter les trains que de les faire arriver à l'heure.”

“They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don’t teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they’re trying to “help” you see “the truth.””

“There's a little pond, in a small town in Poland, where they used to dump the ashes. The pond is still gray, even half a century later. I've heard it said that the holocaust had no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. I'd like to think that's not true. But if it is, then no one on Earth survived this war.”

“If there's four Vietcong in a village with knives and punji sticks, we'll bring in a B-52. And I think, sometimes we need to learn to fight smarter instead of to fight richer. And this is what I mean, you know, education, "oh, education's expensive;" no it's not, books are cheap, (the) internet's cheap, we can fight smarter, we can learn. So, that's where resource-to-kill-ratio comes from.”

“The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis.”

“As soon as the report came in, [General Lang] sat down at his desk, signed a few final orders, addressed and sealed a letter to his family, then put a bullet through his brain. Bastard. I hate him now even more than I did on the way to Hamburg… he knew this was just the first step of a long war and we were going to need men like him to win it… 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 he'd done behind us. [Lang] couldn't do that. He couldn't shoulder the weight.”

“People say, "get us out of the UN, we don't need the UN", we invented the UN. This is us, we are the ones who founded the idea of nations working together, and I think that's something we need to do. And it's, it's messy, and it's really complicated, and there's going to be a lot of countries out there that expect us to clean up there mess, or just want to see us fall on (our) face. And they love that, which is what I think president Obama said brilliantly at the UN, when he basically said, "that ok". If I'm paraphrasing, I don't think he's ever said "ok" in his life, he's probably said "well". But basically he said, "look, for the last eight years you've been on our case about going it alone, you know, we're imperialists, we're hegemonic, we're going it alone, we're going it alone… Ok, we're not going it alone anymore, we're going to listen to you, but you better ante up and kick in. Because, you don't have the right to have an opinion, if you can't back it up. It's put up or shut up time". And I was so happy when he said that, and the way he handled the Latin (American) countries, when he was dealing with the crisis in Central America, the coups in Honduras. And he said, "the very same countries who accuse us of doing nothing, are also the same ones who accuse us of being imperialistic. You can't have it both ways."”

“No one would have expected [the escalation of nuclear hostilities], but then again, no one would have expected the dead to rise, now would they? Only one could have foreseen this, and I don’t believe in him anymore.”

“Do you know how many times, when I was a kid, going to Europe, having a Frenchman try to get on my case about Vietnam. And that wasn't the problem, do you know what it was like to have other kids, other American students go, "yeah, it's pretty bad, in Vietnam, we should, yeah". And I'd be like, 'but, mhmm, French Indochina.', and they'd be like, "Oh is that near Vietnam" (groans). We don't educate our young people, and then we send them out into the world, as ambassadors as lameness. So no, no world empire, I don't want to be responsible for the plumbing in Rwanda, but we do need to become as much of a student of them as they are of us. Because, here's the thing. Well, the problem with the global village, remember in the early 90's, with the term now, global village, well the problem with the global village is that a lot of people are waking up realizing that they are in the global villages ghetto. And now with media, we are broadcasting these images of our wealth, and our power, our society, and the people in the global village are looking up on the hill seeing that mansion, but we're not looking down into the slum, and we need to do that. There's just so many times you can drive slowly through the ghetto in a rich convertible before you get carjacked. So this is what I mean, we need to engage…”

“We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.””

“The dead walk among us. Zombies, ghouls — no matter what their label — these somnambulists are the greatest threat to humanity, other than humanity itself.”