192 Quotes by Eric Schlosser

Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn’t provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every.

Marijuana gives rise to insanity – not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.

What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.

Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can’t be freely shared on the Internet, improved through anonymous collaboration, and productively used without legal constraints.

The Snark eventually ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil.

The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal – but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.

Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them – if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or.

It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo. The.

Kids have no idea when they’re drinking soda what they’re really drinking, and a lot of them are stunned when they learn that drinking a Big Gulp is like taking a big jar of sugar and just pouring it down. There are 50 teaspoons of sugar in a 64-ounce Big Gulp.