Top 40 Daniel Suarez Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, you know – both passions. You can flip from one to the other – but not to indifference.”

— Daniel Suarez

2. “In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat – and some smartass had sold them guns.”

— Daniel Suarez

3. “Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature’s way of preparing us to face difficult realities.”

— Daniel Suarez

4. “My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that’s different but it’s familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.”

— Daniel Suarez

5. “But if they’re so successful, why haven’t parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven’t noticed. That’s because successful parasites don’t kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce...”

— Daniel Suarez

6. “Food is the very heart of freedom. How can people be free if they can’t feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?”

— Daniel Suarez

7. “Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”

— Daniel Suarez

8. “When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.”

— Daniel Suarez

9. “The seat of consciousness – what’s known as ‘sensorium’ – exists partly as an expression of particle entanglement in higher physical dimensions. The human brain is merely a conduit.”

— Daniel Suarez

10. “A very small group of powerful people is deciding what’s going to happen with your data, and they’re using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It’s all about efficiency. And that’s the really scary thing about it.”

— Daniel Suarez

11. “I think technology is spreading, and I think ones experience of technology is going to relate increasingly to class – not so much to country.”

— Daniel Suarez

12. “I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology.”

— Daniel Suarez

13. “I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use Twitter. I don’t give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can’t be localized.”

— Daniel Suarez

14. “At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.”

— Daniel Suarez

15. “Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza iwth roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shard an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.”

— Daniel Suarez

16. “Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.”

— Daniel Suarez

17. “We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.”

— Daniel Suarez

18. “I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.”

— Daniel Suarez

19. “I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.”

— Daniel Suarez

20. “You taught me everything I need to know; self-reliance, self-respect, community. Just don’t be surprised if I actually put it to use.”

— Daniel Suarez

21. “There’s no better time to celebrate friendship than when things are at their worst.”

— Daniel Suarez

22. “A thing can’t exist in people’s minds until it has a name. But with a name, it can exist in people’s minds without existing at all. You should always come up with a name before you set out to create anything.”

— Daniel Suarez

23. “A life where bots tell us what to do every second – get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person – is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn’t even notice.”

— Daniel Suarez

24. “I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.”

— Daniel Suarez

25. “If not in San Francisco, then where? Not Madison, Wisconsin, again, please, dear God.”

— Daniel Suarez

26. “What I caution against is any unaccountable concentration of power. And I don’t care whether that’s the government, a corporation, the church, a really bad-ass girl scouts troop, whatever it is.”

— Daniel Suarez

27. “Gragg felt the tingling of the Third Eye on his stomach and back. The Third Eye was another of the miracles that Sobol had bestowed upon him. It was a form-fitting conductive shirt worn next to the skin – but it wasn’t a garment. It was a haptic device that helped him use his body’s largest organ – his skin – as another, all-seeing eye. An eye that never blinked, and an eye that could see around him in 360 degrees or halfway around the world, if he wished. It.”

— Daniel Suarez

28. “One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions. No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.”

— Daniel Suarez

29. “Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you – not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.”

— Daniel Suarez

30. “For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?”

— Daniel Suarez

31. “He didn’t care. She was a sexual hand grenade with the pin pulled out, but he could never manage to resist her. Whatever this said about him didn’t matter.”

— Daniel Suarez

32. “Every day was filled with surprises. What a change from the network affiliate. Her new boss was an undead automaton from hell, true, but no job was perfect.”

— Daniel Suarez

33. “How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.”

— Daniel Suarez

34. “It’s knowing one’s... limitations... and then ignoring them.”

— Daniel Suarez

35. “Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.”

— Daniel Suarez

36. “With music you can speak to anyone.”

— Daniel Suarez

37. “As it stands, our patrols and bases are just targets, and the more firepower we use, the more enemies we make.”

— Daniel Suarez

38. “Her new boss was an undead automaton from hell, true. But, no job is perfect.”

— Daniel Suarez

39. “It all seems so clear now. Corporate intrusion into public institutions. Corporate domination of culture and media. It happened in plain view, with us cheering on their success as if it reflected well on us. As if it was us.”

— Daniel Suarez

40. “Mankind was on the moon in the 1960s, Jon. That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook?”

— Daniel Suarez

41. “I’ve always been your friend, Alexa. Now go. I will try to kill you as unsuccessfully as I can.”

— Daniel Suarez

42. “Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too – but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.”

— Daniel Suarez

43. “We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It’s a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We’re basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.”

— Daniel Suarez

44. “Human intellect, on the other hand, is expressed through a subatomic network of circuits contained within roughly three pounds of cerebral tissue, evolved over hundreds of millions of years into the most energy-efficient, generalized self-programming array currently known, powered by a mere four hundred twenty calories per day – or.”

— Daniel Suarez

45. “Which is why human society mostly works; people avoid trouble. But behind every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every vote is the implicit threat of rebellion. That’s the bargain that holds a free society together. And no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.”

— Daniel Suarez

46. “And all at once he noticed something about the people around him. It was as though they knew, somewhere deep down, that the future was overdue.”

— Daniel Suarez

47. “Sorry. Just paralyzed by the indescribable beauty of the cosmos. We’ll get to work.”

— Daniel Suarez

48. “Well, for once in my life, I not only know why I’m here, at this place, I finally know why I exist. I’ve always wondered why I was so odd. What possible evolutionary purpose could a person like me serve? No kids. Focused on my own experiences... This is my purpose. This has always been the purpose of people like us. We blaze trails. We chart oceans. We push back frontiers. Without us, humanity slowly dies.”

— Daniel Suarez