Top 70 Matthew FitzSimmons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time was the great leveler, and neither money nor power held sway over its relentless march.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

2. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

3. “What kind of selfish prick hangs himself where he’ll be found by his fifteen-year-old son? No note, nothing. It was unforgivable.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

4. “Entitlement breeds laziness, which in turn breeds decline.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

5. “This was no one’s first choice.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

6. “Entitlement breeds laziness, which in turn breeds decline. But of course with enough money, it is possible not to notice for decades that your family name is gathering dust.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

7. “Life reduced to its most basic needs: food, water, shelter. Hard to make a plan when you were hungry, tired, and scared all the time.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

8. “Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there’s nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

9. “In the immortal words of Duke Vaughn, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

10. “Dan Hendricks, her partner, was a top-notch surveillance man. He’d broken into Gibson’s apartment a week ago and wired it in ninety minutes flat. Motion-activated infrared cameras, bugs, the works. It gave them uninterrupted video coverage of the entire apartment, and the starkness of Gibson’s living conditions was informative.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

11. “An eternal truth of the human condition was that no one ever thought they were evil. No matter how reprehensible their actions, people always convinced themselves they were justified.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

12. “Politics is an ugly picture with a pretty frame.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

13. “Entitlement breeds laziness, which in turn breeds decline. But of course with enough money, it is possible not to notice for decades that your family name is gathering dust. One day you awake to discover that the last member of the family to accomplish anything of note died before Kennedy.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

14. “Most people were overawed by time. They allowed time to bully them, fearing that it was passing too fast or too slowly, sometimes both simultaneously.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

15. “The man rapped his knuckles on the wooden counter for luck.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

16. “Interior design courtesy of Franz Kafka.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

17. “You spent enough time working with computers, and the Internet became a second home. A refuge. A place to share ideas, trade snippets of code, and meet people who shared your interest in the extralegal applications of programming. Could such a person live without the Internet? He supposed it was possible. Yes, a voice countered, but was it probable?”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

18. “The trial was over in nine days, the verdict a foregone conclusion.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

19. “Measuring one’s life in terms of days was purposeless. He could still feel his heartbeat in his chest, still taste the breath from his lungs. He yet lived, and that was the only measure of time that truly mattered.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

20. “Some speed-metal band that believed anything less than 250 beats a minute was elevator music. It amazed her what some people listened to voluntarily. She only knew it as the playlist of CIA black-site detention facilities around the world.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

21. “There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it. – George Bernard Shaw.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

22. “An eternal truth of the human condition was that no one ever thought they were evil.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

23. “When he was a kid, Gibson had mispronounced George Abe’s name until his father corrected him: “Ah-bay. More Japanese, less Lincoln.” As.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

24. “There was an old joke – it’s not the fall that kills you but the abrupt stop.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

25. “Do you know what China is?” Ogden asked. “It’s the Soviet Union on steroids. It’s Russia with a world-class economy and ten times the population. We literally spent the old USSR to death. That won’t happen with China. They are strong, rich, ambitious, and spend close to two hundred billion a year on their military.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

26. “Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which he’d found revelatory at nineteen. An ancient copy of Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street had been a.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

27. “Officer Patricia M. Daniels was not particularly happy to see them. She looked Jenn and Hendricks up and down and went back to hunting and pecking at her keyboard. “Usually.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

28. “She had no doubt that being black in the LAPD – an organization with a historically awful record of race relations – could embitter even the most resilient person.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

29. “The judge emptied his bottle and squinted across the desk at Gibson.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

30. “Regardless of what populist history might argue, you rarely have one without the other.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

31. “WR8TH: i hear ur looking for me.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

32. “His regret was cold and offered no comfort. Filled up with words that he wished he had spoken and the faces he wished he had spoken them to.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

33. “What was the first rule to getting someone to fall in line? Figure out what they need and give them a taste. Not enough to sate them, but enough to whet their appetite. Enough that they wanted more. Needed more.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

34. “This is the short drop,” the man said. “You’ll notice that, unlike the standard drop or the long drop, your neck is not broken.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

35. “No matter what he’d been through, there was no excuse for the way it continued to haunt him. You couldn’t allow your past to define you.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

36. “What happens next?” Gibson found he was curious too. They finished The Return of the King two years later, and in the process, Gibson became a reader. Something.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

37. “You couldn’t allow your past to define you.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

38. “He also took two briefing books that included.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

39. “A memory swam up from the depths, its hideous, reptilian spine almost breaking the surface before it swam powerfully away from him.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

40. “Anyway, the trick is seeing what they’re trying to hide. What are they trying to draw your eye away from? Figure that out, and you figure out the man. Or woman. But start with men, because they’re easier. Women are more of a PhD thing.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

41. “But in a pinch, he was a capable coder too. He just wasn’t especially fast. So when he was finally done coding and debugging his program and ran a successful test, it was past eleven on Tuesday night. He hadn’t slept but for a few hours on Sunday night, and the lack of sleep had cooked him.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

42. “The dead have no rights, or so my lawyers tell me, and rarely rise to defend themselves.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

43. “Never leave accounts unsettled.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

44. “He had questions, but the suit was too cheap to have the answers to them.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

45. “Eight years in the CIA had taught her the art of working with men in close quarters. The first lesson was that men never adapted to women. It was a boys’ club, and you either became one of the boys or you became a pariah.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

46. “You ever wish you could talk sense to who you used to be?”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

47. “It’s at the edge where the truth lies. It’s like hair. Everyone brushes their hair so it looks good from straight on. Why? Because that’s how we see it in the mirror. Straight on. We only ever see ourselves straight on, so that’s the only angle we worry about.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

48. “You rise to a certain level of prominence, and the inclination is to view one’s family with an unhealthy degree of reverence. One is lulled into believing that the family’s success was not a matter of luck and hard work, but due instead to some innate superiority.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

49. “Google’s no substitute for knowing things. Write that down.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons

50. “Most people think they’d always want to live longer, but twenty minutes at the end of a rope is a long time to die. A long time to regret things that cannot be changed and that no longer matter.”

— Matthew FitzSimmons