Marcus Sakey > Quotes

“The world would be a better place if people stopped voting for folksy candidates they could have a beer with and started voting for people smarter than they are.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“. . . the problem with looking for your glasses is that you don’t have your glasses on while you’re looking . . .”
― Marcus Sakey, The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

“Worry is a misuse of the imagination”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“The problem with the best moment in your life is that every other moment is worse”
― Marcus Sakey

“Freedom is not a couch. It’s not a television, or a car, or a house. It’s not an item you can possess. You cannot put freedom on layaway; you cannot refinance freedom. Freedom is something you need to fight for, not once, but every single day. The nature of freedom is that it is fluid; like water in a leaking bucket, the tendency is for it to drain away. Left untended, the holes through which freedom escapes widen. When politicians restrict our rights in order to “protect us,” freedom is lost. When the military refuses to disclose basic facts, freedom is lost. Worst of all, when fear becomes a part of our lives, we willingly surrender freedom for a promise of safety, as if freedom weren’t the very basis of safety.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“You want to change the world? Forget politics. Learn to code.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“She’d always been blunt, to the point that people sometimes mistook her for cold. In truth, she was one of the warmest people he had ever met. It was just that she had the honesty of someone with nothing to prove.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“No, the great thing about the truth is that it’s true.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“Life is a raindrop”
― Marcus Sakey, The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“It was like meeting someone exceptional while you were married: the yank of possibility, the realization that here was another path your life could have taken.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“Frightened people want action more than they want correct action. It’s in the data.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“Maybe the world would burn. But if truth was all it took to start the fire, maybe it needed to.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“Revolution? You’re an idiot. You don’t even know what that word means. Forget your precious Mao and Che and Fidel. If they’ve appeared on a T-shirt, they haven’t changed shit. You want revolution, look at Alexander Fleming. Penicillin transformed the world in ways Lenin and Washington only dreamt of. Now sit down and shut up, you autocratic frat boy. It’s adult swim.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. Being an engineer or an architect had once been high aspirations. Now everybody wanted to be musicians and basketball players, and America didn’t build squat.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“Data. That’s what matters. That’s what tells us something. But people want to see pictures. Supernova in vivid color. Even though scientifically it’s useless.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“the nature of compromise was that no one was happy. That’s how you knew a fair deal had been reached.”
― Marcus Sakey, Written in Fire

“He never realized how noisy American silence was until all the gadgets died.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“The truth was, everything in life came down to intentions and results. Cooper’s intentions in killing Peters and releasing the video had been good; the results had been a disaster. Did that make his intentions wrong? If so, that meant morality was really only a way of talking about how we wished things were. Hope, empathy, idealism—maybe they didn’t matter. Maybe the only thing that counted was results.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“First they came for the revolutionaries, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a revolutionary. Then they came for the intellectuals, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an intellectual. Then they came for the tier ones, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a tier one. Then they came for the brilliants, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a brilliant. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.”
― Marcus Sakey, Written in Fire

“you are going to find that the heights you’ve attained make for a long fall if you don’t understand the mountain.”
― Marcus Sakey, A Better World

“No matter how smoothly you tossed a stone into water, there were always ripples. Alongside”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“That was the thing about terror: it made rational people act irrationally. From a certain perspective, the fear was more destructive than the actual killing.”
― Marcus Sakey, Afterlife

“There was a rumor—a joke? Hard to tell at the DAR—that the fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. Cooper didn’t know about that, but they did make everyone look two weeks dead.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“That was the lure of wealth, he'd discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all - this wine, this woman, this world - for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance

“And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.”
― Marcus Sakey, Brilliance