Darpa Quotes

“Charles Townes said...that he was personally inspired to invent the laser after reading the Science Fiction novel The Garin Death Ray, written by Alexei Tolstoi in 1926. It is remarkable to think how powerful a force Science Fiction can be. That fantastic, seemingly impossible ideas can inspire people like Charles Townes to invent hints that totally transform the world.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated caution, toward the door; these movements it performed in the manner of a prodigiously shitfaced man intent on demonstrating that he had only had a couple of sherries with dinner.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Human performance anomalies arising from extremely rare genetic variations will be exploited for strategic and tactical purposes.

Capabilities for a New Millennium, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency classified document, serial no. 55-89-144, p. 87.”
― Victor Robert Lee, Performance Anomalies