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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

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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
Great
Literary
Bought
Reasons
Neither
Literature
Times
Stuff
Entertaining
Reason
Shakes

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The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend.
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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.
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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.
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In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]
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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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We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity. I am afraid. I will taste fear until I die.
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What man has done, man can aspire to do.
Jerry Pournelle
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The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
Jerry Pournelle
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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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That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.
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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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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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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.
Jerry Pournelle
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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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Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to prove that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.
Jerry Pournelle
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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.
Jerry Pournelle
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Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens.
Jerry Pournelle
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In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.
Jerry Pournelle
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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.
Jerry Pournelle
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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?
Jerry Pournelle