192 Quotes by Eric Schlosser

I think it’s possible to have food that’s healthy, that’s good for you to eat, that’s also inexpensive. We don’t have to have this cheap, unhealthy food being so aggressively promoted.

No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.

Whenever power is concentrated and unaccountable – whether it’s corporate power, governmental power, or religious power – it inevitably leads to abuses. Human beings are imperfect, and you need a system of check and balances to keep them in line, to encourage good behavior. You need competing centers of power.

Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one,” Einstein said. “In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.

Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn’t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.

During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power encouraged him to do it. According to notes of the meeting, held on September 20, Power warned that the United States now faced the greatest danger, ever, of a Soviet nuclear attack.

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.

Nuclear weapons may well have made deliberate war less likely,” Sagan now thought, “but the complex and tightly coupled nuclear arsenal we have constructed has simultaneously made accidental war more likely.” Researching The Limits of Safety left him feeling pessimistic about our ability to control high-risk technologies. The fact that a catastrophic accident with a nuclear weapon has never occurred, Sagan wrote, can be explained less by “good design than good fortune.