Vincent Harris > Vincent's Quotes

“The 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." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only chucked the politics and come together as human bloody beings.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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 leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“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 how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always there…unless you’re the living dead.


For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That’s the kind of enemy that was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That’s the kind of war we had to fight.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“He said that Americans are the only people he’s ever met who just can’t accept that bad things can happen to good people.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“When you think about the CIA, you probably imagine two of our most popular and enduring myths. The first is that our mission is to search the globe for any conceivable threat to the United States, and the second is that we have the power to perform the first.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Children see magic because they look for it.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Nobody's perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him....”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Blessed are the dumbfucks.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Josh: "What is this thing?"
Gasper: "It's a Yeti. An abominable snowman."
Biff: "This is what happens when you fuck a sheep?"
Josh: "Not an abomination, abominable.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“He loved constantly, instantly, spontaneously, without thought or words. That's what he taught me. Love is not something you think about, it is a state in which you dwell. That was his gift.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“The three jewels of Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“You think too much. Thinking will bring you nothing but suffering. Be simple.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“The medium obscured the message.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“There is no such thing as a conservative hero.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“When your best friend is the son of God, you get tired of losing every argument.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“A wall is the defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Go away. Your feet are misshapen and your eyebrows grow together in a threatening way.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“He was a LEPER, you idiot! Not a leopard.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Joshua, my memory of Maggie isn't about what happened the night before we left. I didn't go to see her thinking that we would make love. A kiss was more than I expected. I think of Maggie because I made a place in my heart for her to live, and it's empty. It always will be. It always was. She loved you.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Before we knew it a year had passed, then two more, and we were celebrating the passage of Joshua’s seventeenth birthday in the fortress. Balthasar had the girls prepare a feast of Chinese delicacies and we drank wine late into the night. (And long after that, and even when we had returned to Israel, we always ate Chinese food on Joshua’s birthday. I’m told it became a tradition not only with those of us who knew Joshua, but with Jews everywhere.)”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“Josh,” I said in a harsh whisper, “that kid is as dumb as a stick.” “He’s not dumb, Biff, he just has a talent for belief.” “Fine,” I said, turning to Philip. “Don’t let the kid anywhere near the money.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“By the way, his name was Joshua. Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, which is Joshua. Christ is not a last name. It’s the Greek for messiah, a Hebrew word meaning anointed. I have no idea what the “H” in Jesus H. Christ stood for. It’s one of the things I should have asked him. Me? I am Levi who is called Biff. No middle initial. Joshua was my best friend.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal