Quotes by Government Officials

Today changes must come fast and we must adjust our mental habits so that we can accept comfortably the idea of stopping one thing and beginning another overnight.... We must assume that there is probably a better way to do almost everything. We must stop assuming that a thing which has never been done before probably cannot be done at all.
Donald M. Nelson
Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow;drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine.Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky:by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou.
Bai Juyi
One of the most dangerous forms of human error is forgetting what one is trying to achieve.
Paul Nitze
Not again, Draper," Frank sighed. "You're not going to stop us from crossing. You and I know that the one thing the Government does even more poorly than provide healthcare is secure its borders.
Randy Quarles
If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked
Richard Clarke
Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology.
Régis Debray
... crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time.
Cordwainer Smith
... but remember that I shall love your sorrow...
Cordwainer Smith
The revolution lasted six minutes and covered one hundred an twelve meters.
Cordwainer Smith
There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting.
Cordwainer Smith
I HAVE been around at a time when important things needed to be done
Paul H. Nitze
On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight worldThat we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.
Bai Juyi
The man of the future will be young or he will not be.
Régis Debray
From Olsen's Nation: "Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. Standing as one, the world now sincerely regrets Iran’s nuclear program." — President Bodvar Olsen, fifth State of the Union address
Randy Quarles
There is something of the ghoul in the page-swallower and of the novel-reader in the stroller through cemeteries.
Régis Debray
We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...
Cordwainer Smith
We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...
Cordwainer Smith
religion is no longer the opium of the people but the vitamin pills of the feeble.
Régis Debray