Jerry Pournelle quotes

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action. (Jerry Pournelle)
The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
Jerry Pournelle
I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
Jerry Pournelle
I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.
Jerry Pournelle
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
Jerry Pournelle
Bureaucracies are progressive. meaning they have a burning fear that someone. somewhere, is doing something without permission.
Jerry Pournelle
Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.
Jerry Pournelle
One of the first things they teach stockbrokers is to stay out of the stock market. Brokers make their pile from selling advice, and from commissions on stock transactions. They can't predict the market, and few risk their own money. They, at least, only affect their clients' fortunes. Economists, though, can ruin the lot of us with their advice - yet if no science can predict a relatively closed system like the stock market, how the devil are you going to 'fine tune' something a large as the American economy? I'd think it arrogant to try; as arrogant as the man with three illiterate drug-addicted spoiled brats writing a book on parenting. (Jerry Pournelle)
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. (Note: This quote, although found in the 1985 sci-fi novel, 'Lucifer's Hammer', by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, may be erroneously attributed to Pournelle. As this quote can also be found in the Preface of Henri Poincare's "Science and Hypothesis" the 1952 Dover abridged edition)
Jerry Pournelle
One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee.
Jerry Pournelle
Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It's not like they're a bunch of idiots.
Jerry Pournelle
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?
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
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. (Jerry Pournelle)
I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.
Jerry Pournelle
Everything takes longer and costs more.
Jerry Pournelle
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.
Jerry Pournelle
I thought MAD was truly insane when we first adopted it, and I haven't changed my opinion.
Jerry Pournelle