Daniel Suarez Quotes

Synthetic biology was the transistor of the twenty-first century. Yet political realities in America made it increasingly unfeasible for entrepreneurs there to tinker with the building blocks of life. Every cluster of human cells was viewed as a baby in America. A quarter of the population wasn’t vaccinated. A majority of Americans didn’t believe in evolution. Social-media-powered opinions carried more influence than peer-reviewed scientific research.

Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

Are you familiar with the Fates, Sergeant? Greek legend said that they spun the threads of men’s lives and cut them at a length of their choosing. Like the Fates, I severed the thread of your life . . ..

Exactly. Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.

Yes, space will challenge us, have no doubt, but this is the very challenge humanity needs to cure us of our propensity for bullshit — because space is where bullshit goes to die. Out there only facts and competence keep you alive. Superstition, uneducated guesses, and comforting lies are what must go extinct. Not us.

A thing can't exist in people's minds until it has a name. But with a name, it can exist in people's minds without existing at all. You should always come up with a name before you set out to create anything.

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system — much less a brain — the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.

to understand a people, you need to wade into their culture. It’s culture that tells their tale. And music is culture.

the public doesn’t really decide anything now — they just select from the options they’re given.

Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.

Which is why human society mostly works; people avoid trouble. But behind every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every vote is the implicit threat of rebellion. That's the bargain that holds a free society together. And no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.

Today, for every independent organism in nature, there exist three parasites.

There’s no better time to celebrate friendship than when things are at their worst.