"History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect."

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“I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up.”

“The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for bullshit to them.”

“Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”

“She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.”

“I’m going to go obsessively run diagnostics on systems I know are solid so I can feel like I have control of something.”

“Patriotism was weird shit.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Eannatum, the Great. A brief history of Eannatum, the Alexander of his day."

— Eannatum

-2500–-2424

#history

"This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before, it’s also striking that this is the first time that we will have a great po…"

— Kiron Skinner

Science1961

#history

"In old age... we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived."

— Knut Hamsun

Literature1859–1952

#history

"Direct observation of the testimony of the earth ... is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history. If Mr. Bryan, w…"

— Henry Fairfield Osborn

Science1857–1935

#nature