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The arrogance of some of those who are so damned sure they are right is just astounding. Scientific witch hunts are often the worst kind, and have been since the secular authorities stopped enforcing the local bishop's decrees of anathema.

Jerry Pournelle

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Jerry Pournelle
Age: 84 †
Born: 1933
Born: August 7
Died: 2017
Died: September 8
Essayist
Fiction Writer
Journalist
Novelist
Political Scientist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Shreveport
Louisiana
Jerry Eugene Pournelle
Science
Math
Hunts
Enforcing
Right
Physics
Damned
Decrees
Kind
Scientific
Witch
Anathema
Authority
Secular
Astounding
Worst
Arrogance
Bishop
Since
Locals
Decree
Sure
Local
Authorities
Often
Stopped
Bishops

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That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.
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The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
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As a means of subsidizing lawyers the present nuclear regulation system is well designed - but is there not perhaps a cheaper way of rewarding legal diligence? It would probably be cheaper to give each law school graduate a guaranteed salary of $50,000 a year on the condition that he (or she) not practice law.
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What man has done, man can aspire to do.
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In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.
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You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.
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The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?
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Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It's not like they're a bunch of idiots.
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A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.
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I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.
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Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.
Jerry Pournelle
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The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash.
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One of the things we must be able to agree to is to lose an election and not take to the streets.
Jerry Pournelle
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And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
Jerry Pournelle
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Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens.
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Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, works only as long as it works it does not know what to do if deterrence fails, for it envisions no defensive capabilities. A deterrent works until it is needed then one needs defenses.
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We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity. I am afraid. I will taste fear until I die.
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Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.
Jerry Pournelle
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The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled.
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And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Jerry Pournelle