74 Quotes by Sylvain Neuvel

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.

The aesthetics aren't merely a side note, they're as important as anything else.

North Korean troops gathering… inside North Korea.That is unheard of.""They were massing very close to the border.""North Korea is the size of Ohio. It would be geographically challenging for them to gather very far from the border.

They have me in a bunk next to this guy, Bilal. He’s just a year older than me. He—this is nuts—he studied plant biology in Helsinki. He worked in a bar to pay for school. There’s nothing special about him. Not his DNA. He’s not even Muslim. He’s a Hindu, but he was born in Pakistan, so…It’s pathetic. These people can’t even do racist right.

We should really set up the elevator for this. [...] It's bad enough I have to bring up furniture. When you speak to our mutual friend, ask him if they found anything resembling an alien stepladder in the Arctic.

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.

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.

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

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.