Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly. The subject - as sculptors themselves are fond of saying - is hidden in the block of material.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.