Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.

Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.

If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don't tell you that?

Don't let the secret recipe die with the inventor.

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.

Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.

Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.