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Title: World War Z
Authors: Max Brooks
Category:supplementals
Number of Highlights: 12
Date: 2024-06-11
Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how theyâre used.
I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.
Tags:motivation,stress
You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.
Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation.
Tags:favorite,perception,secrets,transparency
But even with ideals like that there comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.
Even those considered middle class enjoyed, or took for granted, a level of material comfort unheard of by any other nation at any other time in human history.
The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. Thatâs the way the world works. But one day it doesnât. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.
In totalitarian regimesâcommunism, fascism, religious fundamentalismâpopular support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash. In a democracy, the polar opposite is true. Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment.
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.
For every one profiteer, or repulsive psychopath, there were ten good and decent people whose karma was still untainted. A lot of fishermen and small boat owners who could have simply escaped with their families chose to put themselves in danger by continuing to return to shore.
I once met an ex-Iranian pilot who was traveling through Canada looking for a place to settle down. He said that Americans are the only people heâs ever met who just canât accept that bad things can happen to good people.
That is the nature of human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past its limit of endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always thereâŠunless youâre the living dead.