Top 40 Max Barry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When it’s done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.”

— Max Barry

2. “People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.”

— Max Barry

3. “That’s the thing you learn about values: they’re what people make up to justify what they did.”

— Max Barry

4. “Apparently we’re now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don’t think anything of it.”

— Max Barry

5. “The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I’ll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.”

— Max Barry

6. “By this action, the Government has proved that so long as it exists, none of us are truly free. Government and freedom are mutually exclusive. So if we value freedom, there’s only one conclusion. It’s time to get rid of this leftover relic we call Government.”

— Max Barry

7. “Words aren’t just sounds or shapes. They’re meaning. That’s what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked.”

— Max Barry

8. “With Lola, everything was solvable. She was my independent variable.”

— Max Barry

9. “I will not be what I was made, but what I make.”

— Max Barry

10. “My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum.”

— Max Barry

11. “Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they extorted upon the landscape.”

— Max Barry

12. “Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What’s with that?”

— Max Barry

13. “Companies were getting a lot tougher on labor contracts these days; Hack had heard stories. At Adidas, if you quit your job and your replacement wasn’t as competent, they sued you for lost profits.”

— Max Barry

14. “Some people would break the rules to get things done and some wouldn’t; it was simple as that. John didn’t have much use for the latter.”

— Max Barry

15. “A panic state is not helpful to good decision making.”

— Max Barry

16. “And I, methinks, am gone astray In trackless wastes and lone.”

— Max Barry

17. “Corporations! It’s like there are these gigantic monsters living among us, and we don’t mind that they’re monsters because when we look at them they smile and hand us cheeseburgers. That’s nuts.”

— Max Barry

18. “I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn’t be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola’s heart beat fastest for me.”

— Max Barry

19. “And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That’s a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn’t read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that’s as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.”

— Max Barry

20. “There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.”

— Max Barry

21. “It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.”

— Max Barry

22. “I love you,′ she said. She nestled closer, her hand moving up the back of his neck. The wind lifted. ‘Don’t kill me,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to,’ she said.”

— Max Barry

23. “Australians were very practical, Emily had found. They did things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It was refreshing and guenuine but sometimes led to situations like building a town around a hole.”

— Max Barry

24. “We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found.”

— Max Barry

25. “The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.”

— Max Barry

26. “I’m not a privacy nut, and I don’t care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they’re all working for that data, how much money they’re spending, and how they never admit that’s what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.”

— Max Barry

27. “Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.”

— Max Barry

28. “You went to school,” Lee said. “I mean, at some point. And it didn’t suit you very well. They wanted to teach you things you didn’t care about. Dates and math and trivia about dead presidents. They didn’t teach persuasion. Your ability to persuade is the single most important determinant of your quality of life, and they didn’t cover that at all. Well, we do. And we’re looking for students with natural aptitude.”

— Max Barry

29. “After a while, he sat. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She felt very close to him. “I promise not to turn you into my thought slave,” she said, and felt him smile a little. But she had thought about it.”

— Max Barry

30. “When someone thinks, “I liked his last book, I’ll hope this new one is good” and shells out their hard-earned, I fervently want that person to be thrilled.”

— Max Barry

31. “Kikkhf fkattkx hfkixu zttkcu,” she said.”

— Max Barry

32. “Librarians are amazing like that. They will hand you a book they know will make your eyes bug out because they know that is the point of novels, not to satisfy but to surprise.”

— Max Barry

33. “It was funny how as soon as you knew there was something better, what you had seemed unbearable.”

— Max Barry

34. “Imagine a hundred million people clicking polls and typing in their favorite TV shows and products and political leanings, day after day. It’s the biggest data profile ever. And it’s voluntary. That’s the funny part. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.”

— Max Barry

35. “A tragedy like this, we all blame ourselves.”

— Max Barry

36. “She could taste loss in the back of her throat so badly that she could vomit.”

— Max Barry

37. “He strode briskly away, to do whatever it was the managers did. Have meetings, I guess. Make phone calls. It was hard for us on the technical side to understand why the company required so many managers. Engineers built things. Salespeople sold things. Even Human Resources I could understand, kind of. But managers proliferated despite performing very few identifiable functions.”

— Max Barry

38. “You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyze what you’re hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you’ve got nothing. You’ve delegated the ability to make up your mind.”

— Max Barry

39. “I have nothing and no one but you, and you’re useless. That’s not a personal commentary. It’s a statement of fact.”

— Max Barry

40. “You know, this all started when they got rid of tax. That’s when everyone started buying out of society. When we had tax, we had a community.”

— Max Barry

41. “Elizabeth puts her hands on her hips. Elizabeth has shoulder-length brown hair that looks as if it has been cut with a straight razor and a mouth that could have done the cutting. Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged; that is, she is a sales representative. If Elizabeth’s brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye. ‘Do you want to ask me a question, Roger? Do you want to ask if I took your donut?”

— Max Barry

42. “To me, though, there’s nothing particularly difficult to understand about a man who murders what he loves, and blames her for it.”

— Max Barry

43. “Roger is a powerful, confident, good-looking man kept awake at nights by the heart-gripping fear that other people don’t think he is powerful, confident, and good-looking.”

— Max Barry

44. “Persuasion stems from understanding. We compel others by learning who they are and turning it against them.”

— Max Barry

45. “You think I need to say something to make it real.”

— Max Barry

46. “I don’t know how anyone can appreciate devotion that slavish. It’s not objective. I have a similar issue with religion.”

— Max Barry