Ag Riddle Quotes

Here’s a tip. The good guys ask you to get in the truck. The bad guys put a black bag over your head and throw you in the truck. I’m asking.

A healthy person has a hundred wishes, but a sick person has only one.

When you figure out that you're fighting some other man's war, walk away.

A mind that dwells in the past builds a prison it cannot escape. Control your mind, or it will control you, and you will never break through the walls it builds.

It’s always the same war. Only the names of the dead change. It’s always about one thing: which group of rich men get to divvy up the spoils. They call it ‘The Great War’—clever marketing.

Great leaders are forged from the fire of hard decisions,

That’s what life is about: finding something you can do that no one else can, and working your hardest at it. It’s about finding someone you love like no one else, someone who loves you like no one else does.

Science lacks something very important that religion provides: a moral code. Survival of the fittest is a scientific fact, but it is a cruel ethic; the way of beasts, not a civilized society. Laws can only take us so far, and they must be based upon something—a shared moral code that rises from something. As that moral foundation recedes, so will society’s values.

Who wants to try and fail, when you can drink and laugh with no consequences?

You must see the darkness to appreciate the light.

Ma’am, your husband was killed in an unfortunate Cadbury Creme Egg incident.

We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.

The journey is the destination. Finding the answers for yourself, achieving understanding, is part of your journey. There are no shortcuts along the path.

We so often seek what we’re deprived of in childhood. Sheltered children become reckless. Starving children become ambitious.

Disasters are an opportunity for the worst of humanity. And the best.

So you don’t want to believe?” “With science, what I want is irrelevant. Proof of a hypothesis is all that matters.

Life is a test we take every day. You must focus. You must be there for them when they need you.

In our pursuit for the ultimate knowledge, the technologies we created eventually enslaved us, taking the last of our humanity before we even knew it was slipping away.

Life is hard—for everyone—but it’s hell on earth if you’re foolish or weak.

Life is uncertain; in the end we control only a single thing: our own thoughts. He

It was history repeating itself. The same players, playing out a different game, with the same end, on a different stage.

The worst thing you can do for a child is give him everything he wants. Humans should grow up a little hungry, struggle a little, be made to strive for something. That’s what builds character. Struggle reveals who we really are. That journey shows us what we want from this world.

I wonder what the world would be like if we could all glimpse our future before every major decision. Maybe that’s what stories are for: so we can learn from people living similar lives, with similar troubles.

And when he was, when he finally found love after a life without, he died, happy. And the woman, all she ever wanted was to know that she could change the world, and if she could change the heart of the darkest man, then there was hope for the entire human race.

It’s amazing how clear your dreams are when you’re a kid and how complicated life gets after that. How a single ambition turns into a hundred desires and details—most of which are about what you want and who you want to be.

I believe that a good book leaves its readers better than they were before.

Leave it to a kid to sum up the state of my career so accurately in two words. And leave it to an adult to rationalize it in three: “It’s a living.

She craves genuine things, real people. We so often seek what we’re deprived of in childhood.

Life is uncertain; in the end we control only a single thing: our own thoughts.

That was the key to survival—doing better tomorrow than you did today. Getting up every day and improving.

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

I think that says a lot about a person: how they handle being second best. Do they work on themselves? Or attack the person ahead of them?

The attacks did two things really well: ensured there was a war, a big one—and crashed the stock market.

Great marketing can sell an inferior product for a short time. Only a strong product can sell itself

Why is it that we only appreciate things we’re at risk of losing?

everybody’s scared of failure and being seen as a disappointment. The longer the shadow is, the farther you have to walk.

There are only two possibilities: either human life emerged because the laws of the universe support it by random chance, or the alternative: the universe was created to foster human life.

While the world around him was changing, Ares was staying the same. He was truly a relic, a man out of time and out of touch. There were no battles left for him to fight, no great campaign, no reason to exist.

Religion is our desperate attempt to understand our world. And our past. We live in darkness, surrounded by mysteries. Where did we come from? What is our purpose? What will happen to us after we die? Religion also gives us something more: a code of conduct, a blueprint of right and wrong, a guide to human decency. Just like any other tool, it can be misused.

What? Are you crazy—

Another truth: parents desire for their children the things they never had.

Whoever thought books didn’t save lives was so very wrong.

Yes, it’s a lie, but the media repeated it, and a lie repeated becomes perception, and perception is reality.

The journey is the destination. Finding the answers for yourself, achieving understanding, is part of your journey.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in business, it’s that giving a tyrant what he wants doesn’t solve your problem. It only makes it worse.

A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting and running internet companies before retiring to focus on his true passion: writing fiction. He grew up in a small town in North Carolina and

A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.” Kate

Today’s decisions are tomorrow’s reality.

Passion, rage—no matter how much we evolve, man can’t escape these instincts: our heritage as beasts. We can only hope to control the beast inside us.

I pull my sidearm and fire at them from point-blank range, killing the first two men, who must have either thought I was dead or couldn’t see me

every human alive today is directly descended from a man who lived in Africa sixty thousand years ago.

The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time.

events in the past—events that are key to finding a cure for the plague.” “Interesting,” Kate murmured.

enough vodka to kill a Russian army.

if you want to build a better world, you must first have the courage to destroy the world that exists.

I guess we’re all capable of evil, under the right circumstances.

Sonja!” David called around the hall. “Switch with me.

You putt around this tiny planet in painted aluminum cans that burn the liquefied remains of ancient reptiles. Do you honestly think you could beat us in a fight?

There was no single meaning of life—there was only the meaning of your life.

For your first job, don’t pick the one that pays you the most. Or the one where you like the people the most. Pick the one where you can learn the most.

Life isn’t about your limitations. They matter far less than you think. You make a living doing what you’re good at. That’s what’s important—your strengths, not your limitations.

Human history has a repeating theme: we battle pandemics, we lose, we die, it burns itself out, and we rebuild. We always come out the other side stronger. Humanity marches on.

The strongest friendships and the strongest relationships are forged in the hottest fires.

Any change that takes power from those who have it will face opposition.

what ultimately matters in a survival situation: the will to live.

Dreamers die foolish deaths.

For her, thinking was the greatest enemy of sleep.

The West Virginia Children’s Home. It’s in Elkins. See that they get the balance of the account. And that they know that it came from my father.

We know that every human being on the planet is directly descended from one man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago—a person we geneticists call Y-Chromosomal Adam.

Because when you’re young, life is about pursuing dreams. I have the rest of my life to take the safe road.

To me, this is what great books are about, revealing our own lives in a way only stories can; we see ourselves in the characters, our own struggles and shortcomings, in a way that’s nonthreatening and nonjudgmental. We learn from the characters; we take those lessons and inspiration back to the real world. I believe that a good book leaves its readers better than they were before.

Survival of the fittest is a scientific fact, but it is a cruel ethic; the way of beasts, not a civilized society. Laws can only take us so far, and they must be based upon something—a shared moral code that rises from something. As that moral foundation recedes, so will society’s values.

What idea?” “I’ll be back.” “Wake me up in an hour,” David called to her as she left. There was no way she would wake him up in an hour. He needed rest. If Kate was right, he would need to be at the very top of his game.

He refused to think about it. Qian’s words echoed to him: “A mind that dwells in the past builds a prison it cannot escape. Control your mind, or it will control you, and you will never break through the walls it builds.” Milo

The sun dims and sometimes it goes out completely. But the sun always rises again. Time heals all wounds, but enduring those times is what defines us. We have to take care of ourselves during the winters of our lives. I hope you will.

file. “Not surprising. It’s not widely accepted, but it’s a popular theory among evolutionary biologists.” “Popular theory for what?” “The Great Leap Forward.” Kate recognized David’s confusion and continued before he could speak. “The

The conspiracy theorists claimed that a Nazi sub left Germany just before the fall of the Third Reich, carrying away the highest ranking Nazis and the entire treasury, including priceless artifacts that had been looted and top-secret technology.

The only mystery that matters is who’s gonna survive. There are two groups left. The people with the flamethrowers and the people catching the flames. You’re holding a flamethrower right now. So shut up and be happy. And don’t make friends. You never know

Every human is born with a birthright. That birthright is happiness. Our greatest challenge to achieving happiness is not the obstacles we encounter in our life. The true barrier to happiness lies inside of us—and it’s the one thing we can’t ever escape: our own mind.

As a beast, he had lived in a world of bliss, acting on his instincts, thinking only when he had to, never seeing himself for what he was, never worrying about his mortality, never trying to cheat death. But now his thoughts and fears ruled him. He knew evil for the first time.

For the first time, he saw the world as it truly was, and he saw dangers all around him—in the beasts of the forest and in his fellow man. As a beast, he had lived in a world of bliss, acting on his instincts, thinking only when he had to, never seeing himself for what he was, never worrying about his mortality, never trying to cheat death. But now his thoughts and fears ruled him. He knew evil for the first time. Your

He jerked the man into the dark corridor, and they set out again. Dorian was glad to be out of the humid, freakish place with the snakes and flying invisible birds, and who knew what else. He wanted to barricade the entrance, ensuring that nothing made it out, but there was no time.

I feel . . . extraordinarily lucky just to be alive and well. I’ve taken that for granted, just being alive and healthy. It wasn’t until I was at risk of losing my life or my leg that I fully appreciated how lucky I’ve been. Why is it that we only appreciate things we’re at risk of losing?

For the most part, we live in an uncomfortable equilibrium with bacteria and viruses, both those inside of us and those outside, in the natural world. But every now and then, the war reignites. An old pathogen, long dormant, returns. A new mutation emerges. Those events are the epidemics and pandemics we confront. They are the battles we fight.

Religion is our desperate attempt to understand our world. And our past. We live in darkness, surrounded by mysteries. Where did we come from? What is our purpose? What will happen to us after we die? Religion also gives us something more: a code of conduct, a blueprint of right and wrong, a guide to human decency. Just like any other tool, it can be misused. But

The piano keys represent the genome. We each get different keys, and the keys don’t change throughout our life: we die with the same piano keys, or genome, we’re born with. What changes is the sheet music: the epigenetics. That sheet of music determines what tune is played—what genes are expressed—and those genes determine our traits—everything from IQ to hair color.

That Continuity can just take Janus and Chang’s research and just… I don’t know, ‘snap it together’ like the Triforce and magically have the cure?” “Triforce?” “Seriously?” “What?” “From Zelda,” David said. “You know, Link collects the Triforce to rescue Princess Zelda and save Hyrule.” “I never saw it.” “It’s uh… a video game, not a movie.” How can she not know this?

That's what great books are about, revealing our life in a way stories only can. We see ourselves in the characters, our own struggles and short comings in a way that's non threatening and non judgmental. We learn from the characters we take those lessons and inspirations back to the real world I believe that a good book leaves its readers better then they were before.

He remembered reading that Antarctica had ninety percent of the world’s ice and seventy percent of its freshwater. If you took all the water in the world, in every lake, pond, stream and even water in the clouds, it wouldn’t come out to even half of the frozen water in Antarctica. When all that ice melted, the world would be a very different place. The sea would rise two hundred feet, nations would fall—or more accurately, drown—low-lying countries like Indonesia would disappear from the map. New York City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and most of Florida—also gone.

anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences.

As I said, gravity slows time down. The stronger the gravity, the slower time passes. So the closer to Earth you are, the slower time goes. If you get close enough to very, very strong gravity, say a black hole, time almost stands still. If you crossed the event horizon of a black hole in a spaceship, you would watch the entire fate of the universe unfold in the seconds before you were sucked into the center.

Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of “biological dark matter.” In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier.

So 50,000 years ago, there’s us, the Neanderthals, Hobbits, and Denisovans. Actually there were probably a couple more hominids, but the point is there were say five or six subspecies of humans. And then our branch of the human tree explodes while the others die out. We go from a few thousand to seven billion people in the span of fifty thousand years and the other human subspecies go extinct. We conquer the globe while they die in caves. It’s the greatest mystery of all time, and scientists have been working on it since time began. Religion too.

The man on the other end of the satellite phone looked up when the GPS coordinates flashed on his screen. He copied the location and searched the satellite surveillance database for live feeds. One result. He opened the stream and panned the view to the center of the iceberg, where the dark spots were. He zoomed in several times, and when the image came into focus, he dropped his coffee to the floor, bolted out of his office, and ran down the hall to the director’s office. He barged in, interrupting a gray-haired man who was standing and speaking with both hands held up.

The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it: we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human subspecies. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, a war we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.” Kate didn’t know what to say, couldn’t see how it could involve her trial and her children. “You expect me to believe those two children are involved in an ancient cosmic struggle for the human race?

We do know that humans got hit hard by the Toba Super Volcano. We were on the brink of extinction. That caused what population geneticists call a ‘population bottleneck.’ Some researchers believe that this bottleneck caused a small group of humans to evolve, to survive through mutation. These mutations could have led to humanity’s exponential explosion in intelligence. There’s genetic evidence for it. We know that every human being on the planet is directly descended from one man who lived in Africa around sixty thousand years ago—a person we geneticists call Y-Chromosomal Adam. In fact, everyone outside of Africa is descended from a small band of humans, maybe as few as one hundred, that left Africa about 50,000 years ago. Essentially, we’re all members of a small tribe that walked out of Africa after Toba and took over the planet. That tribe was significantly more intelligent than any other hominids in history.

Oh, but my netherling side did, and she casts my human armor aside. She guides my hands, knots my fingers through his hair, teases his tongue with hers. She won’t let me pull away, because she wants to be there again. In Wonderland, where his tobacco-flavored kisses always take us . . . Because the things I loathe are the things she adores: His snark, his infuriating condescension. His menacing mastery of half-truths and riddles. The way he shoves me into the face of danger, forces me to look beyond my fears and reach for my full potential. Most of all, because he encourages me to believe in the madness ...in her . . . the darker side of myself: the queen who was born to reign over the Red kingdom and to give Wonderland a legacy of dreams and imagination. His gloved palms seek the bend of my waist, the bow of my hips. He moves me on top of him, so close there’s not enough space for a blade of grass between us. His kisses grow insistent, desperate. His flavor winds through me, fruit and smoke and earth, and other things born of shadows and storms . . . things I can’t put a name to.

The cure for HIV?” “In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy, he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.” “Incredible.” “Yes. At first, we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV.

Retroviruses are simply viruses that can insert DNA into a host’s genome, changing the host at a genetic level. They’re a sort of “computer software update.” When a person contracts a retrovirus, they are essentially receiving a DNA injection that changes the genome in some of their cells. Depending on the nature of the DNA inserted, getting a virus could be good, bad, or benign, and since every person’s genome is different, the result is almost always uncertain. Retroviruses exist for one purpose: to produce more of their own DNA. And they are good at it. In fact, viruses make up the majority of all the genetic material on the planet. If one added together all the DNA from humans, all other animals, and every single plant—every non-viral life form on the planet—that sum total of DNA would still be less than all the viral DNA on Earth.