Top 160 Max Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Looking for love on the internet is like Janet Leigh asking Norman Bates if he likes her body.”

— Max Brooks

102. “They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls.”

— Max Brooks

103. “I think the fascination with zombies is that they don’t obey the rules of monsters. The first rule of monsters is that you have to go find them. You have to make a conscious choice to go to the swamp or the desert or the abandoned summer camp.”

— Max Brooks

104. “We can’t just mourn the deaths, we also have to celebrate the lives. We need Anne Frank’s diary, but we also need her smile on the cover.”

— Max Brooks

105. “Nice to be able to say, “Hey, don’t look at me, it’s not my fault.” Well, it is. It is my fault, and the fault of everyone of my generation.”

— Max Brooks

106. “When Travis D’Ambrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. I always listened to him when he told me a certain weapons system was vital.”

— Max Brooks

107. “Of all the weapons discussed in this book, nothing is more important than your primary firearm. Keep it cleaned, keep it oiled, keep it loaded, keep it close. With a cool head, steady hand, and plenty of ammunition, one human is more than a match for an army of zombies.”

— Max Brooks

108. “With so much protection, wouldn’t one be able to wander among the undead ranks, taunting them at will with no danger of repercussion?”

— Max Brooks

109. “The bottom line is I’m a slow zombie guy – I’m always a slow zombie guy but I also know I’m in the minority.”

— Max Brooks

110. “It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for a few seconds, long enough to hole up and wait for the shooting to die down. Only it didn’t. Pistols, shotguns, and that clatter you never forget, the kind that tells you someone has a Kalashnikov.”

— Max Brooks

111. “I think the general anxiety of the 1960s – ’70s spawned our interest in the living dead. When people worry about the end of their world, they need a safe vessel for all their fears. Zombies provide that vessel because they’re ’safe.”

— Max Brooks

112. “Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn’t strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have?”

— Max Brooks

113. “When fighting for your life, it may simply be too easy to flip the switch to “rock ’n’ roll,” no matter how wasteful and useless this might be.”

— Max Brooks

114. “What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge.”

— Max Brooks

115. “Americans are an honest people, we expect a fair deal. I know that a lot of other cultures used to think that was naive and even childish, but it’s one of our most sacred principles.”

— Max Brooks

116. “We split the atom, we reached the moon, we’ve filled every household and business with more gadgets and gizmos than early sci-fi writers could have ever dreamed of.”

— Max Brooks

117. “It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.”

— Max Brooks

118. “People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.” Her lips soured. “Maybe that’s my problem too.”

— Max Brooks

119. “Hooking on scuba gear and blindly diving into zombie-infested water is a wonderful way to mix the two childhood terrors of being eaten and drowning.”

— Max Brooks

120. “Humans who believe they have outrun their undead pursuers might do well to remember the story of the tortoise and the hare, adding, of course, that in this instance the hare stands a good chance of being eaten alive.”

— Max Brooks

121. “I wrote ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’ because I wanted to read it, and nobody else was writing it. All I’ve been doing with everything I’ve written is answering questions that I had.”

— Max Brooks

122. “Are you going to deny that King’s leverage was based on the fear of Malcolm X?” Sensing an opening, I tried to break the siege. “An open hand works when the alternative is a fist.”

— Max Brooks

123. “You can tell everything about a person by what happens when he opens his mouth.”

— Max Brooks

124. “If there’s anything worse than visualizing your own death, it’s knowing that you caused it.”

— Max Brooks

125. “A lot less energy to convert animal into animal than vegetable into animal. And the brain boost we got from that bonanza. Tools, language, cooperation. You can see the incentive for all the advances that make us human. More meat. Bigger brains. Bigger brains. More meat. I wonder what it looked like, when we first tasted fresh blood. What did we think? What did we feel? That moment when everything changed. From scavenger to predator. Hunted to hunter.”

— Max Brooks

126. “As stated before, in Western – particularly American – culture, there is the myth of the individual superbeing. One man or woman, well-armed and highly skilled, with nerves of steel, can conquer the world. In truth, anyone believing this should simply strip naked, holler for the undead, then lay down on a silver platter.”

— Max Brooks

127. “To the folks at Mojang, Lydia.”

— Max Brooks

128. “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.”

— Max Brooks

129. “Personally, I could have cared less.”

— Max Brooks

130. “I heard a theory once that if aliens ever do come calling, they may very well be hostile, because the same brains that mastered spaceflight learned to think by hunting.”

— Max Brooks

131. “And Professor Tongun, from Sudan, “Like a tree in the forest, America doesn’t hear foreign suffering.”

— Max Brooks

132. “Same room, different priorities.”

— Max Brooks

133. “I don’t mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.”

— Max Brooks

134. “Redeker believed that to try to protect everyone would stretch the government’s resources to the breaking point, thus dooming the entire population. He compared it to survivors from a sinking ship capsizing a lifeboat that simply did not have room for them all. Redeker had even gone so far as to calculate who should be “brought aboard.”

— Max Brooks

135. “Conventional executions might have reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down, but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by guilt as well.”

— Max Brooks

136. “Knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.”

— Max Brooks

137. “Its gold boots are, in fact, glowing.” “Glowing with what?” “Can’t say. Some sort of magic, I guess.”

— Max Brooks

138. “You can’t blame the people in Greenloop for having their cupboards bare. The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.”

— Max Brooks

139. “In a radiated planet, the walking dead might be the only creatures left “alive.” We.”

— Max Brooks

140. “Need. That’s what makes a village. That’s what we are now, and what holds us together is need. I won’t help you if you don’t help me. That is the social contract.” I couldn’t really process what she was saying.”

— Max Brooks

141. “Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.”

— Max Brooks

142. “I tried to go back online. Isn’t that funny? All I could think about was trying to escape again, getting back to my world, being safe.”

— Max Brooks

143. “The first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality” was the closing statement for his proposal, “for its survival will mean our destruction.”

— Max Brooks

144. “We were taught since birth to bear the burden of our grandfathers’ shame. 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

145. “Selfless suffering feels good for short crusades, but as a way of life, it’s unsustainable.”

— Max Brooks

146. “Funny thing about the army, they always promise to teach you “marketable skills,” but they never mention that, by far, there’s nothing more marketable than knowing how to kill some people while keeping others from being killed.”

— Max Brooks

147. “The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.”

— Max Brooks

148. “I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained. And if an answer can’t come from facts, we’ll try to cobble one together from old stories.”

— Max Brooks

149. “Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it.”

— Max Brooks

150. “People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.”

— Max Brooks