Subcomandante Marcos Quotes

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?

Probably all the books I've ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

If I'm not a successful human being, who I am?

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.

Obviously, I'm not a Neanderthal. I do do laundry. I am a human being.

I get called lots of things - a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer - and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!

Art is what defines us, what makes us human.

I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself?.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

Is Islam a tribe or is it a force of globalization? Islam has certainly been studied as a local, tribalistic phenomenon. But Islam is also theoretically a universalist idea, its spread has been facilitated by modern technologies, and it's an identity that people can slip into and out of fairly easily. I don't think Islam has really been understood as a product of globalization. It might be one of these instances where globalism and tribalism ultimately go hand in hand.

Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill?

Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.

Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had. I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.