Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity

But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.

You cannot do only one thing.

(Technology reliability) x (Human reliability) = (System reliability)

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.

Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The only thing we can really count on in this uncertain world is human unreliability itself.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

If you can visualize it, you can actualize it.

To my mind by far the greatest danger in scholarship...is not that the individual may fail to master the thought of a school but that a school may succeed in mastering the thought of the individual.

I have not been briefed.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

Look what's happened to Barack Obama over the last two years or George Bush for eight. It's a blood sport. But at some point, I may feel the need to run for office again.

Only faith in Christ gives rise to a culture contrary to egotism and death.

I see no conflict between science and religion. When you take truth in either one of these realms, science or religion, they match perfectly.

I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art

A lot of composers I know hate temp scores because people get attached to them.