Jerry Pournelle Quotes

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

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.

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.

One of the things we must be able to agree to is to lose an election and not take to the streets.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.

Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.

That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.

We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enjoy the plunder.

I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.

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.

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

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

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.

The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.

What man has done, man can aspire to do.

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.

The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.

...with what we spent in Iraq we could build nuclear power plants and space solar power satellites and tell the Arabs to drink their oil.

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.

Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

Everything takes longer and costs more.

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.

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens.

Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.

If you submit a search of the following phrase on Google, you get over four hundred returns, and they are often very strange ones: "I have more information in one place than anybody in the world."

We're basically after Joe's beer money, and Joe likes his beer, so you better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having his six-pack of beer would be.