Quote

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.

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
Point
Fleets
War
Smash
Another
Third
Stills
Thirds
Still
Army
Way
Build
Building
American

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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens.
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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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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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In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.
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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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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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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.
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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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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 importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
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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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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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