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We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity. I am afraid. I will taste fear until I die.

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
Fear
Variable
Variables
Priceless
Gravity
Eggs
Taste
Afraid
Dies
Juggle

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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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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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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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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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In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.
Jerry Pournelle
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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.
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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.
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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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The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
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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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.
Jerry Pournelle
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That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.
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
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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]
Jerry Pournelle
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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 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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Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.
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Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.
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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.
Jerry Pournelle
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What man has done, man can aspire to do.
Jerry Pournelle