Quotes from Andrew Mayne

There's a clarity that arrives when life forces you into a binary situation.

Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to. You divorce your wife because you don't love her. You murder her because you hate her.

When no amount of evidence can convince you that your worldview might be inaccurate, then we've exited the realm of reason and entered religious territory. This is why I laugh at the notion of reconciling faith and science. Science is based on the premise that logic and reason can tell us the true nature of reality. Religion is based on the idea that when logic and reason don't support a predetermined view of reality, they are at fault.

As my hero Richard Feynman would say, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone. —Charles Darwin

A mistake we make too often in science is thinking that having a name for something is the same as understanding it. A skeleton in a museum or a drop of blood

Sometimes you don't get to choose your struggles—they choose you.

The next time you get into a political discussion, stop and ask yourself what amount of evidence would change your mind. If the answer is none, then realize you're actually in a religious discussion, one more zealot arguing with another. Have I mentioned I'm not on Facebook?

Dwelling on the sins of the past won't help us stop the evils of the present.

It's one thing to kill someone and not leave evidence or hide the body so it's never found, but to be able to murder someone and have everyone think it was an accident of nature? That's some kind of genius.

Don't overthink it. Just write.

more evidence so I don't look like a conspiracy-theory crackpot when I try to point out that not only was the real Toy Man not killed a few days ago in a Brazilian prison before he could be extradited, he's actually a war criminal living as a minister in Georgia.

Besides the emotional difficulty of literally defacing another human being, I become aware of the practical problem.

We're all twisted messes inside. What matters is how we manifest our actions on the surface.

How do you weigh the known versus the unknown? You can't. It all comes down to what statistics you choose to believe.

one of the gifts of science: when you discover a new truth, you also gain a new way of looking at things that can change your perspective.

We exchange knowing nods, aware that this won't really end the pain, but killing monsters never does. It's just something you have to do when you see them for what they are.

A story isn't what happens. It's how it happens.

I'm still not ready to throw away my moral compass, even if I can't read it.

They give you the chance to tell small lies so they can see how you handle the bigger ones. There's a reason lawyers tell you to shut up when a cop talks to you. If you're lucky, that's the first and last time a cop ever

They've met a thousand liars and heard a million lies. Yours ain't gonna fly. They won't tell you that you're full of crap—they'll keep you talking, getting you to lie about a bunch of things, making notes in their head while you tell yourself that you're the most persuasive motherfucker on the planet. They want you to walk away thinking you got away with it, or so panicked you screw up in front of them.

Science isn't a book of explanations. It's a process. A process we're continuing to refine and make more precise. Despite setbacks and wrong turns, nobody has ever seriously said the problem with science was its demand for more precision and deeper understanding.

Sharks have millions of years of preprogrammed strategies. Dolphins have cheat codes.

You're a garbage woman with a badge,