Sylvain Neuvel > Quotes

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“Family has a way of bringing out the worst in people. Every people.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“It would make things easier for both of us, especially for you, if we could forgo the part of this conversation where you take me for a complete idiot...”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“People often confuse leadership with managerial skills.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“I hate this world. People are small. They’re ignorant, and they’re happy to stay that way. They make an effort to. They’ll spend time and energy finding ways not to learn things just to feel comfortable with their beliefs.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Only Human

“I never understood why people use words they do not understand.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“I was smart enough to know it was wrong, but not brave enough to stop them.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“North Korean troops gathering… inside North Korea.
That is unheard of."

"They were massing very close to the border."

"North Korea is the size of Ohio. It would be geographically challenging for them to gather very far from the border.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“Stories are there to entertain, preserve history, or serve a societal purpose of some kind.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“People are denying even the most basic scientific facts because it makes them feel better about hurting each other. Do you realize how horrifying that is? We’re talking about human beings making a conscious effort, going out of their way, to be ignorant. Willfully stupid. They’re proud of it. They take pride in idiocy. There’s not even an attempt to rationalize things anymore.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Only Human

“She has more issues than the New York Times.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“Perhaps, deep down inside that rugged shell of yours, there is a little girl desperately waiting for her Prince Charming to propose."

"Of course there is. Only until now, I'd been pretty successful at keeping that little brat's mouth shut.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“I think people are scared, and dumb, and selfish on their own, but put enough of them together and they'll be half-decent”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“When faced with a choice, humans almost invariably seek a no-action, no-change option, even when one of the presented alternatives is quantifiably and logically more advantageous.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, The Test

“Scientists are like children: They always want to know everything, they all ask too many questions, and they never follow orders to the letter.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“I thought something bad might have happened to him. It's nice to know he just doesn't want to talk to me.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“What I am is very much a function of what I am not. If the "other" is the Muslim world, then I am the Judeo-Christian world. IF the other is from thousands of light-years away, I am simply human. Redefine alterity and you can erase boundaries.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“System justification is the idea that many of our needs can be satisfied by defending and justifying the status quo. It gives stability to our political and economic systems because people are inherently inclined to defend it. It prevents people at a disadvantage from questioning the system that disadvantages them, makes people buy the inevitability of social inequity, ignore or support policies that hurt them.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, The Test

“Vincent: "Rose, we can't fight this guy."
Rose: "Can you..."
Vincent: "Kara, what are you doing?"
Rose: "What's going on?"
Vincent: "Kara's... engaging in diplomacy."
Rose: "She's what?"
Vincent: "She's giving him the finger. Very mature, Kara!”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“If you see something wrong with the world, fix it. But what if it’s the whole world that needs fixing?”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Only Human

“While I am reasonably confident you are not “the chosen one,” you are without doubt one who has been chosen.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“You were made for a particular purpose, but you can be anything you want. Anything, including that.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods

“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.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Only Human

“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?”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods