Top 120 Douglas Preston Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”

— Douglas Preston

2. “Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, critique.”

— Douglas Preston

3. “The truth shall make you free, but first it will make you miserable.”

— Douglas Preston

4. “Fortune makes promises to many, keeps them to none. Live for each day, live for the hours, since nothing is forever yours.”

— Douglas Preston

5. “The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid.”

— Douglas Preston

6. “My hobbies are mountain biking, horseback riding and packing, canoeing and kayaking, hiking, camping, cooking, and skiing.”

— Douglas Preston

7. “It’s a very bad habit, but one I find hard to break.”

— Douglas Preston

8. “People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future.”

— Douglas Preston

9. “Hubris and science are incompatible.”

— Douglas Preston

10. “What was that line of Sophocles from Oedipus Rex? “How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.”

— Douglas Preston

11. “The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.”

— Douglas Preston

12. “All power structures, by their very nature, eventually get taken over by psychopaths. Almost all governments in the world have been taken over by gifted psychopaths who have a great command of human psychology and use normal people to their advantage. This race of pathological deviants can’t feel compassion, they have no conscience. They have an insatiable need for power – and they rule the world.”

— Douglas Preston

13. “Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.”

— Douglas Preston

14. “To one side, a vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, polished to a gem-like brilliance, sat on a flatbed trailer, ready to be taken to its new owner. Constance looked from Pendergast to the Rolls and back again. “I really don’t need two, you know,” he said.”

— Douglas Preston

15. “A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.”

— Douglas Preston

16. “New York City. Once it got into your blood, you could never get it out again.”

— Douglas Preston

17. “Servandae vitae mendacium.”

— Douglas Preston

18. “Fortuna spondet multa multis, praestat nemini, vive in dies et horas, nam proprium est nihil.”

— Douglas Preston

19. “In the distance he could see the Cape May lighthouse winking, one short, one long.”

— Douglas Preston

20. “Inside the “cells” there were no normal-looking organelles, no nuclei, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, or Golgi bodies.”

— Douglas Preston

21. “We live in a world gone crazy for resources. Everybody on Google Earth can look at this place now. If you don’t move to protect it, it will disappear. Everything in the world is vulnerable.”

— Douglas Preston

22. “Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator “Stumpy.” Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to Stumpiniceps troglodytes, a particularly mundane kind of bottom-feeder that populated the oceans of the Carboniferous period.”

— Douglas Preston

23. “Most people are about as aware of their surroundings as a sea cucumber.”

— Douglas Preston

24. “The three-million-dollar Omega-9 Parallel Processing Computer, which took up a series of large gray boxes along one wall, was now completely silent.”

— Douglas Preston

25. “There’s a respected theory in astronomy called Panspermia,” Glinn finally continued. “It holds that life may have spread through the galaxy in bacteria or spores carried on meteorites or in clouds of dust. But.”

— Douglas Preston

26. “Trying to fulfill earthly desires was like carrying water to the sea; a never- ending task, and an ultimately useless one.”

— Douglas Preston

27. “And what better place to sow vengeance – to, quite literally, turn Gotham into a City of Endless Night?”

— Douglas Preston

28. “No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.”

— Douglas Preston

29. “One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.”

— Douglas Preston

30. “In the twentieth century the Mormon Church sent a number of well-funded archaeologists to Mexico and Central America to try to confirm the stories through site excavations. Although this resulted in valuable, high-quality research, it also proved difficult for the scientists themselves; facing clear evidence that disproved the Mormon view of history, some of the archaeologists ended up losing their faith, and a few of those who voiced their doubts were excommunicated.”

— Douglas Preston

31. “You see, when someone says “it’s impossible,’ I have this very bad habit, I can’t help myself, I immediately contradict that person in the most positive terms possible. A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break.”

— Douglas Preston

32. “The twentieth century showed us the evil face of physics. This century will show us the evil face of biology.”

— Douglas Preston

33. “I have often found it true that the louder a person speaks, the less they have to say.”

— Douglas Preston

34. “What was she doing working in a big museum, anyway, when she really should be tucked away in some semidetached house in the suburbs with a pack of squalling brats? Who was this husband she was allegedly so loyal to? Maybe the problem was she was rogering someone on the side already. Yes, that was probably it.”

— Douglas Preston

35. “The poison in the arrow that had struck her was, in chemical structure, like curare; it paralyzed first, killed second. It is not a merciful death: one dies fully conscious and aware of one’s surroundings.”

— Douglas Preston

36. “My first job was washing dishes in the basement of a nursing home for $2.10 an hour, and I learned as much about the value of hard work there as I ever did later.”

— Douglas Preston

37. “God give me chastity, but not right now.”

— Douglas Preston

38. “The myths of the White City, the City of the Monkey God, a Casa Blanca or Kaha Kamasa, have a similar arc: There was once a great city in the mountains struck down by a series of catastrophes, after which the people decided the gods were angry and left, leaving behind their possessions. Thereafter it was shunned as a cursed place, forbidden, visiting death on those who dared enter.”

— Douglas Preston

39. “Beware the dog that does not bark, and the man who does not talk.”

— Douglas Preston

40. “He found Pendergast’s cool gaze on him, and he fidgeted. He’d forgotten about those eyes. They made you feel like you had just been stripped of your secrets.”

— Douglas Preston

41. “Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You’re an improbable person, and so am I.”

— Douglas Preston

42. “While dead men tell no tales, their corpses often speak volumes.”

— Douglas Preston

43. “I would have to say the novel ‘War and Peace’ influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.”

— Douglas Preston

44. “At the rear of the courtyard, several chairs had been placed beneath a vined trellis, and it was here Pickett at last spied Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. He was wearing a white linen suit similar to the one Pickett recalled from their meeting a fortnight or so earlier at a rooftop bar in Miami Beach. One leg was flung over the other, and beautifully made loafers of buttery leather were on his feet.”

— Douglas Preston

45. “One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being “as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.”

— Douglas Preston

46. “There are many essential police skills they don’t teach you at the Academy,” said Pendergast. “Ass covering, as it is so charmingly termed, being the most important.”

— Douglas Preston

47. “Wine is like many of the fine experiences in life which take time and experience to extract their full pleasure and meaning.”

— Douglas Preston

48. “Gideon,” he said, “think for a minute about the qualities that a leader – even a co-leader – is required to have. He’s a team player. He’s good at inspiring others. He’s able to hide his true feelings, put up a false front when necessary. He projects confidence at all times – even if he doesn’t feel confident. He can’t be a freelancer. And he’s certainly not a loner. Now, tell me: do any of these qualities describe you?”

— Douglas Preston

49. “I felt that I was witnessing the beginnings of a great sea change in America. I was deeply moved. Through this terrible ordeal of Vietnam, I believed, we might finally see America becoming what the founding fathers had envisioned, a nation with a moral purpose in the world and a nation that cared about all its citizens. We might see the end of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger version of realpolitik. It hasn’t turned out that way, but then we are all a little older and wiser.”

— Douglas Preston

50. “She’s more a daiquiri and margarita drinker.”“We all have our flaws,” said Pendergast.”

— Douglas Preston