Top 70 Sylvain Neuvel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s easier to be just one more soldier in a giant army than being the whole army by yourself.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

2. “System justification is the idea that many of our needs can be satisfied by defending and justifying the status quo. It gives stability to our political and economic systems because people are inherently inclined to defend it. It prevents people at a disadvantage from questioning the system that disadvantages them, makes people buy the inevitability of social inequity, ignore or support policies that hurt them.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

3. “I’m a scientist. I find beauty in absolutes. I love the clarity of math, its unwavering dependability. Math will never say one thing and do another one. It will never harm you on purpose because its only purpose is truth.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

4. “People are compliant because they don’t expect the system to be fair.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

5. “I was smart enough to know it was wrong, but not brave enough to stop them.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

6. “If you fall in love with someone, there’s a good chance the person won’t love you back. Hatred, though, is usually mutual. If you despise someone, it’s pretty much a given they’re also not your biggest fan.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

7. “I came to realize that good and evil were out of my reach, that time was the only thing I had any control over. I could buy time, create intervals. I could not truly make the world a better place, but I could make part of it a better place for a short while.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

8. “If you see something wrong with the world, fix it. Fight. Resist. Don’t use cardboard.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

9. “If you see something wrong with the world, fix it. But what if it’s the whole world that needs fixing?”

— Sylvain Neuvel

10. “I hate this world. People are small. They’re ignorant, and they’re happy to stay that way. They make an effort to. They’ll spend time and energy finding ways not to learn things just to feel comfortable with their beliefs.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

11. “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

12. “You’re right, I don’t trust people easily, but I have faith in numbers. – Interesting. – I do. I think people are scared, and dumb, and selfish on their own, but put enough of them together and they’ll be half-decent.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

13. “People who owe me favors are called friends.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

14. “Go home and tell your family you love them. Tell them ten times, a hundred times. Do it while you can. And if we somehow survive this, keep doing it. In the end, it’s all that really matters.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

15. “While I am reasonably confident you are not “the chosen one,” you are without doubt one who has been chosen.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

16. “You will not die of pain, but you will never get used to it. Pain is unique in that it does not show habituation or neural adaptation, like smell, or touch.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

17. “I don’t think either of us will get to grow old, especially if we’re together. The only question is: Do I wanna die young with anyone else?”

— Sylvain Neuvel

18. “Generally speaking, people tend not to question what they’ve been told was true. Scientists are no different; they’ve just been told a lot more things.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

19. “Can you keep an open mind? Are you willing to challenge what you know to be true?”

— Sylvain Neuvel

20. “I may believe in God, but I’m at war with Him. I’m a scientist, I try to answer questions, one at a time, so there’s a little less room for Him as the answer. I plant my flag, and inch by inch, I take away His kingdom. It’s odd, but none of this has ever occurred to me before. I never even saw a real contradiction between science and religion. I see it now, I see it clear as day.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

21. “Stories are there to entertain, preserve history, or serve a societal purpose of some kind.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

22. “I think people are scared, and dumb, and selfish on their own, but put enough of them together and they’ll be half-decent.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

23. “There’s this tendency for people to see any fight against the system as a fight for progress. As if the people before them couldn’t possibly have gotten anything right. If you’re using bombs instead of words, that means you’re banking on people giving you what you want out of fear instead of reason. That’s never a good sign.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

24. “Deadwood sure isn’t thriving, but it’s still standing. And the landscape is breathtaking. It’s sitting right on the edge of the Black Hills National Forest, with its eerie rock formations, beautiful pine forests, barren rock, canyons, and creeks. I can’t think of a more beautiful place on Earth. I can understand why someone would want to build something there.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

25. “Well, you, Rose Franklin, are made of the exact same stuff as the Pillars of Creation. No more. No less. That’s how special and insignificant you are.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

26. “What I am is very much a function of what I am not. If the “other” is the Muslim world, then I am the Judeo-Christian world. IF the other is from thousands of light-years away, I am simply human. Redefine alterity and you can erase boundaries.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

27. “They’re saying the system is rigged against them. I’m saying they’re not even a part of it, not in a meaningful sense anyway. They’ve been sold an illusion of democracy. And they bought it! They really bought it. They don’t want to get rid of the system. They’re asking for more representation in it. They don’t even realize that the whole thing is built to keep them out.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

28. “Scientists are like children: They always want to know everything, they all ask too many questions, and they never follow orders to the letter.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

29. “The aesthetics aren’t merely a side note, they’re as important as anything else.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

30. “People who talk a lot about the environment are always the ones living the farthest away from nature.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

31. “She has more issues than the New York Times.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

32. “When faced with a choice, humans almost invariably seek a no-action, no-change option, even when one of the presented alternatives is quantifiably and logically more advantageous.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

33. “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

34. “If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

35. “It would make things easier for both of us, especially for you, if we could forgo the part of this conversation where you take me for a complete idiot...”

— Sylvain Neuvel

36. “People often confuse leadership with managerial skills.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

37. “Here the aversion to decision-making is reinforced by a phenomenon called reactance: when we feel that someone, or something, is threatening or eliminating our behavioural freedom, even just limiting our options, our innate reaction is to try to re-establish that freedom.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

38. “People are denying even the most basic scientific facts because it makes them feel better about hurting each other. Do you realize how horrifying that is? We’re talking about human beings making a conscious effort, going out of their way, to be ignorant. Willfully stupid. They’re proud of it. They take pride in idiocy. There’s not even an attempt to rationalize things anymore.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

39. “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

40. “Family has a way of bringing out the worst in people. Every people.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

41. “We wouldn’t really see anything at night, from this altitude, but it still felt good, like a layover in Paris. You never leave the airport, but even so, you’re in Paris.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

42. “They’ll protest war, but the everyday stuff, small injustices, they just let them slide. Friends making a fortune off government contracts, paying a hundred dollars for a pencil, that type of thing, people complain about it, everyone does, but they won’t do a thing. I remember how floored I was when he told me it was a good thing, how we need a certain level of cynicism for society to function.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

43. “We’re not the greatest thing in the universe, certainly not the smartest. Seems logical there’d be a great many things in it we can’t comprehend.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

44. “You were made for a particular purpose, but you can be anything you want. Anything, including that.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

45. “I never understood why people use words they do not understand.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

46. “I can’t make the forest grow faster because I want it to. I can’t will it to grow. It takes time.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

47. “Parents feel a great deal of responsibility for the way their children turn out, but there is very little a parent can do that will remotely rival the influence a friend or lover can have.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

48. “They find a decent, good-looking man who doesn’t judge them and treats them like a princess. They realize how lucky they are and they never let go. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

— Sylvain Neuvel

49. “It takes about a week after you announce it before you realize that the proposal was really the only part of getting married that was about you. The wedding itself? That’s all about your mother, your aunt who’s dying, how it’ll look like you’re taking sides if this second cousin you never met isn’t invited.”

— Sylvain Neuvel

50. “I was never really good at making friends. I liked reading; I liked walking in the woods; I liked being alone.”

— Sylvain Neuvel