Top 160 Max Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was ‘Hunt for Red October’ by Tom Clancy.”

— Max Brooks

52. “Maybe some instinct told them it was time to swap evolution for devolution, reach back to who they were to take back what was theirs.”

— Max Brooks

53. “Only one could have foreseen this, and I don’t believe in him anymore.”

— Max Brooks

54. “Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year’s harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.”

— Max Brooks

55. “The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton.”

— Max Brooks

56. “History has proven that a well-trained individual, with nothing but a rock, has a better chance of survival than a novice with the latest technological marvel.”

— Max Brooks

57. “He knew that fear was the only weapon he had left to save my life and if I didn’t fear the threat of the plague, then dammit, I was going to fear him!”

— Max Brooks

58. “We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z.”

— Max Brooks

59. “There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.”

— Max Brooks

60. “Zombies will try to scale any surface no matter how unfeasable or even impossible. In all but the easiest situations, these attempts have met with failure. Even in the case of ladders, when simple hand-over-hand coordination is required, only one in four zombies will succeed.”

— Max Brooks

61. “America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t only uncontested, it was positively devastating.”

— Max Brooks

62. “Zombies let us explore notions of the apocalypse – no water, food, medical care, the government imploding – while letting us sleep at night.”

— Max Brooks

63. “They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing.”

— Max Brooks

64. “I couldn’t believe that something so beautiful could come from fire.”

— Max Brooks

65. “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.”

— Max Brooks

66. “I’m not a horror fan. I’m an anti-horror fan. I think horror fans feel deep down in the pit of their souls, they feel safe, and therefore bored. And therefore they want to be scared.”

— Max Brooks

67. “But no matter what happens to the surviving humans, there will always be the walking dead.”

— Max Brooks

68. “Before I’m a zombie nerd, before I’m a science-fiction nerd, I am a history nerd.”

— Max Brooks

69. “They realized that the best way to mask what they were doing was to hide it in plain sight. Instead of lying about the sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping for.”

— Max Brooks

70. “I was the first one to come up with a workable pitch: a vaccine, a real vaccine for rabies. Thank God there is no cure for rabies. A cure would make people buy it only if they thought they were infected. But a vaccine! That’s preventative! People will keep taking that as long as they’re afraid it’s out there!”

— Max Brooks

71. “It’s ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict.”

— Max Brooks

72. “To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.”

— Max Brooks

73. “The facts were out; it was now a question of who would believe them.”

— Max Brooks

74. “How could those in power, especially in such a modern, enlightened age as ours, ignore the spread of a deadly disease until it reached plague proportions?”

— Max Brooks

75. “Zombies have no memories of their former life. You wont see the undead trying to wash windows or do your taxes. All they know how to do is swarm and feed.”

— Max Brooks

76. “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.”

— Max Brooks

77. “Keep focused! Keep going!”

— Max Brooks

78. “After all we’d been through, we still couldn’t take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other’s throats.”

— Max Brooks

79. “And yes, I know I saw something. We both did. But knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.”

— Max Brooks

80. “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

81. “Fear and anxiety. I’ve lived with the latter all my life. Now it’s gone.”

— Max Brooks

82. “Any survival guide will tell you, don’t buy a pair of combat boots before any disaster. They’ll tear your feet up. Or water – don’t bring water with you because it’ll tire you out and you’ll lose too much fluid. Bring a water pump.”

— Max Brooks

83. “Worry rose up on a bubble of realization.”

— Max Brooks

84. “You ever hear about that experiment an American journalist did in Moscow in the 1970s? He just lined up at some building, nothing special about it, just a random door. Sure enough, someone got in line behind him, then a couple more, and before you knew it, they were backed up around the block. No one asked what the line was for. They just assumed it was worth it. I can’t say if that story was true. Maybe it’s an urban legend, or a cold war myth. Who knows?”

— Max Brooks

85. “We’ve been at peace about as long as e were at war.”

— Max Brooks

86. “Zombies are apocalyptic in nature. They belong to a class of monster that doesn’t just hunt humans, but seeks to obliterate that entire human race.”

— Max Brooks

87. “When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that’s another story.”

— Max Brooks

88. “Confidence, it’s the fuel that drives the capitalist machine.”

— Max Brooks

89. “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. This myth is the by-product of an organization, which, by its very nature, must exist and operate in secrecy. Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation.”

— Max Brooks

90. “If you had a loved one, a family member, a child, who was infected, and you thought there was a shred of hope in some other country, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to get there? Wouldn’t you want to believe there was hope?”

— Max Brooks

91. “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

92. “I hope what I’ve learned helps you find your way. Most of all, I hope you’ve learned that in this world of mines and crafting, the most important thing you can craft is you.”

— Max Brooks

93. “You would have entire suburban neighborhoods of upper-middle-class professionals, none of whom had possessed even the basic know-how to replace a cracked window.”

— Max Brooks

94. “A true crisis. Class 3 outbreaks, more than any other, demonstrate the clear threat posed by the living dead. Zombies will number in the thousands, encompassing an area of several hundred miles.”

— Max Brooks

95. “It is because of this enemy, the enemy of time, that I have forsaken the luxury of hindsight and.”

— Max Brooks

96. “I think Americans are at our best when we recover from a crisis. We’ve suffered some blows that other countries would have never recovered from.”

— Max Brooks

97. “We were taught that, even if we wore a uniform, that our first sworn duty was to our conscience, no matter what the consequences.”

— Max Brooks

98. “Unlike the seeds, I’d thrown the bucket much farther out. I tried swimming underwater, looking in its general direction and seeing nothing but inky midnight. I splashed to the surface, inhaled deeply then crash-dived like a submarine. There it was! In the purple haze of subsurface sunlight, I could just make out a small object hovering on a narrow ledge of gravel. Just one block over, and it would have been lost forever.”

— Max Brooks

99. “Unlike the escapee, your team of hunters will be out during the brightest, hottest, most excruciating part of the day. Make sure each hunter is well supplied with water and antisunstroke accessories.”

— Max Brooks

100. “For starters, you must understand the inherent difference between a castle and a palace. A.”

— Max Brooks