The fears of man are many. He fears the shadow of death and the closed doors of the future. He is afraid for his friends and for his sons and of the specter of tomorrow. All his life’s journey he walks in the lonely corridors of his controlled fears, if he is a man. For only fools will strut, and only cowards dare cringe.

The experience of war never quite leaves a young man or woman. A great many are utterly destroyed by it. All are indelibly and subtly marked by it, because, for good or evil, the memory never quite leaves any of us.” Col.

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.

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.

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.

You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it’s all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.

It’s not only possible, but likely that the Nobel Prize in economics will go in alternate years to people who disagree on nearly everything fundamental.

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.

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.

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.