...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.

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.

To stand on the firing parapet and expose yourself to danger; to stand and fight a thousand miles from home when you're all alone and outnumbered and probably beaten; to spit on your hands and lower the pike; to stand fast over the body of Leonidas the King; to be rear guard at Kunu-Ri; to stand and be still to the Birkenhead Drill; these are not rational acts. They are often merely necessary.

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.

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.

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.

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.