“At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.”
“What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”
“Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.”
“This is how a man looks when he's deciding that the risk of death is better than the risk of change.”
“He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.”
“Clay said, "If they have flashlights like us, we can almost assume-"
"We can't assume anything," [Alice] said restlessly, querulously. "My father says assume makes an ass out of you and me. Get it, u and-"
"I get it," Clay said.”
“Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or-to use language with which Jordan is comfortable-a single line of written code which cannot be stripped.'
'The PD,' Jordan said. 'The prime directive'.
'Yes,' the Head agreed. 'At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”
“Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People.”
“Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that get in his way.”
“Can a mordern city burn,' he asked Tom. 'One made mostly of concrete and metal and glass? Could it burn the way Chicago did after Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern?”
“It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it’s a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there’s no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot”
“At half past three, in the ditch of the night, Alice said: “Oh, Mummy, too bad! Fading roses, this garden’s over.”
“It'll be all right, Clay. Really." "So you say, but you have a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur." "That's true," Tom said, "but they're balanced out by poor self-image and ego menstruation at roughly six week intervals...”
“That tight little accent grated on Clay’s frayed nerves. He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma.”
“He did it with a teacher's natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility, interruption his privilege.”
“En el fondo no somos homo sapiens, pues nuestro núcleo es la locura, y la directiva primordial, el asesinato. Lo que Darwin fue demasiado educado para expresar, amigos míos, es que no llegamos a dominar el mundo porque seamos los más inteligentes ni los más malvados, sino porque siempre hemos sido los cabrones más chiflados y asesinos de toda la selva.”
“His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed.”
“have no interest in handing down an indictment of mankind. If I did, I’d point out that for every Michelangelo there’s a Marquis de Sade, for every Gandhi an Eichmann, for every Martin Luther King an Osama bin Laden. Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.” He”
“La inteligencia humana terminó por imponerse al instinto asesino, y la razón sofocó los impulsos más dementes de los hombres.”
“إنّي أحبّك، وعندما أحسنُ إليك فإنّما أحسِن إلى نفسي.”
“Love is not love
Which alters when alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
Oh, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
“Edging,” said Gray. “The ability to keep a sub in a heightened state of sexual arousal. Or in Jack terms: basic fucking self-control.” All humour had gone from his voice.”
“Sure, they all have iPods, smartphones, whatever. Generally speaking, it’s in our own best interest to keep some kind of electronic device in their hands. Otherwise they might talk to us.”
“Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore from 1959 until 1990, making him, we believe, the longest serving prime minister anywhere. His party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), dominated elections and that dominance was reinforced by the allocation of public housing, upon which most people in Singapore rely. Neighborhoods that fail to deliver PAP votes come election time found the provision and maintenance of housing cut off.18 In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe went one step further. In an operation called Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out the Rubbish), he used bulldozers to demolish the houses and markets in neighborhoods that failed to support him in the 2005 election.”
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