institutions

But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn't actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.

NASA's purpose, consistent over three decades, was to block access to space, not to build for it.

But after a while she started to wonder why these beautiful spaceships kept on flying up to orbit and coming back down without ever going anywhere.

"There is no 'them.' Or I'm part of 'them.' I'm a senior official in the national space program. I have to try to make things happen.

There were more rituals, as they headed out of the building towards the bus that would take them to the pad. There was a card game called Possum's Fargo that they had to play, for instance, with a couple of the techs. Rosenberg couldn't believe his eves. Here they were, the five of them, like huge insects in their glaring orange pressure suits, standing around a table to play what seemed like, to him, a kid's version of poker. But—rigid tradition had it—they couldn't leave, until the commander, Angel, in this case, had lost a hand. It took six hands.

I'd made the error of admitting that I didn't know exactly where it was. Inside the concent it was fine to admit ignorance, because that was the first step on the road to truth. Out here, it just gave people like Crade an opening to seize power.

There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

He could relax in the hospital, since no one there expected him to do anything. All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or get better, and since he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.

They gave him design parameters, but no details about use. He had been working in the dark. And now that the system was up and running, he wasn't surprised to learn there were bugs. What did they expect? And they'd ordered him down here in a panic, all hot and bothered about "his" bugs. It was annoying, Nedry thought.

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election-time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

For a while, therefore, it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States—mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.

The laws defined the behaviors that were legal. Possibly it was chicken and egg, but never was it effect causing cause—that would scramble the definitions of the words beyond comprehension.

But if history teaches us anything it is that frontiers become settled, then set, then rigidly bureaucratized, and the more bureaucrats there are, the more laws are needed to keep them fed.

I am now moved to suppose, with my primitive understanding of economics, that every successful government is of necessity a Ponzi scheme.

"I don't think anybody understands what's really going on." "Some people must," I said. I no longer believe that.

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors.

Product teams complain that they don't understand the big picture—they don't see how their work contributes to the larger goals, and they're struggling with what it means to be an empowered, autonomous team.

In practice, of course, Taylor also tried to keep the proceedings as easy and as informal as possible, to the point of having the conference room furnished with beanbag chairs. He even let the speakers set the rules for how each meeting would proceed, much as a card dealer could call the game in Las Vegas; thus their nickname, Dealer Meetings. And when the arguments got heated, which they often did, the minister's son would do his best to convert a "class-one" disagreement—one in which the combatants were simply yelling at each other—into a "class two" disagreement, in which each side could explain the other side's position to the other side's satisfaction. You don't have to believe the other guy, he would tell them. You just have to give a fair account of what he's saying. And it worked. As one CSL member later explained it, Taylor's class one/class two exercise was amazingly effective at clarifying unspoken assumptions and ferreting out facts that one person knew and another didn't. "So by the time you get done," he said, "you all know the same set of things, and you end up concluding the same thing."

Pope Pius VII declared that the United States "had done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages." (In his nostalgia for Lepanto, perhaps, His Holiness was evidently unaware that the Treaty of Tripoli, which in 1797 had attempted to formalize the dues that America would pay for access to the Mediterranean, stated in its preamble that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. Of course, those secularists like myself who like to cite this treaty must concede that its conciliatory language was part of America's attempt to come to terms with Barbary demands.)

The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without that assumption, the entire field would collapse. There isn't any fundamental axiom for sociology yet, but it might be even darker than economics.

The ancient flint spearhead was manufactured in minutes by a single person, who relied on the advice and help of a few intimate friends. The production of a modern nuclear warhead requires the cooperation of millions of strangers all over the world – from the workers who mine the uranium ore in the depths of the earth to theoretical physicists who write long mathematical formulas to describe the interactions of subatomic particles.

When even the law can keep up with you, you know you can't be doing anything very radical or profound.

"Statistically, that is not a valid—" "These people do not look like statisticians." "Politics." Doob sighed. Luisa chuckled. "I hear you, sugar. I'm not gonna say you're wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—'politics'—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization."

Society can be seen as a conspiracy of unquestioning acceptance of unprovable things.

enabling the Nazis to use their war against drugs to feed into a surveillance state quite soon after they came to power.

The whole process had been everything he hated—niggling on details and nuances, fighting over turns of phrase and the order information was presented in, fashioning something that, even where it wasn't outright false, was tailored to be misunderstood. Politics at its most political.

That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.