Sylvain Neuvel QUOTES

61 " 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 , Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)

62 " I was never really good at making friends. I liked reading; I liked walking in the woods; I liked being alone. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)

63 " People are compliant because they don't expect the system to be fair. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

64 " Mr. Couture is not an American citizen. He is from Montreal. It is a large city, about the size of Boston, in that very large country just north of here. You may have heard of it. They play hockey. — "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)

65 " 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 , Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)

66 " Those are not my words. In fact, I had to look up the exact quote. Like everyone else, I only knew 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' We tend to romanticize good quotes, and I always imagined Oppenheimer uttering those words while staring at the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. In reality, he spoke those words during an interview for an NBC documentary in 1965. He had had twenty years to think about it. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)

67 " People who owe me favors are called friends. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)

68 " The moral of the story is…Jeff is a moron. A baby axolotl can’t fight a fish! You can’t expect babies to do the things adults do. You can’t expect anyone to do things they can’t do. If you ask me to lift five hundred pounds, I can’t. It doesn’t matter how much I want to, how much conviction I put into it. It’s just not something I can do. Maybe if I’d been training all my life, but not now, not tomorrow. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

69 " 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 , Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)

70 " Luck is believing you’re lucky. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)

71 " The goal of the values assessment is not the selection of model human beings, but of model citizens. This means the test should favour homogeneity, not atypical attitudes, no matter how commendable they may be. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , The Test

72 " 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. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

73 " Muslims are bad because they are, that’s all. Why would you need a reason? It’s one thing to let your child go blind because you read on Facebook that the measles vaccine would make him autistic, it’s another to ship him off to a work camp because he inherited his grandmother’s genes instead of Grandpa’s. Our entire race is trying to lobotomize itself. It’s as moronic and repulsive as someone cutting off their own legs. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

74 " If you see something wrong with the world, fix it. Fight. Resist. Don’t use cardboard. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

75 " 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 , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

76 " —You don’t like patriots?

—I like the concept. It sounds good. To love the place where you’re from, nothing’s wrong with that, right? It’s all good. But is it love, really? Or is it pride?

—I don’t understand.

—Well, you can love something that’s ﬂawed. It’s harder to be proud of it. Can you love something you’re not proud of? Much easier if you can do both. That’s where it gets messy because you need a reason. You have to have something to be proud of. Is it quality of life, education? How would you know? It has to be something much simpler. You, and people just like you. You start believing you’re better than everyone else. Other people, well, their culture is messed up, they have the wrong values, they’re not as good, not as smart, or they’re just plain evil. You can hate them or pretend you’re a good person and just be condescending. Everyone else is just as proud as you are for the exact same reasons, but they’re wrong, and you’re right.

That’d be just ﬁne—you can buy more tanks and go to war with the guy next door—but then you look around and you see those same people inside your country. More than that, they want the same rights, the same opportunities, as everyone else. Shit, they could be in charge! So you start taking things away from them, making sure they’ll stay where they belong, and let the real citizens make the decisions. You step on your own people, you keep them down, because you’re proud of your country, because you’re a patriot. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

77 " I killed god and I feel empty inside. "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)

78 " You build a revolution on ideas. If the population doesn't buy your ideas, it means they're not ready, or you're wrong. 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 , Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

79 " 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 , Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)

80 " Why do you do that? Ask if you can ask a question? Has anyone ever said no? "

― Sylvain Neuvel , Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)