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.
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.
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
One of the things we must be able to agree to is to lose an election and not take to the streets.
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.
The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled.
Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, works only as long as it works; it does not know what to do if deterrence fails, for it envisions no defensive capabilities. A deterrent works until it is needed; then one needs defenses.
Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens.
Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don’t join writer’s clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing’s changed.
I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.
The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There’s always something better to do, like I’ve got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There’s always something better to do. Going to a writer’s club?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you’re going to throw away.
Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.
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.