Scott Litvinoff

“So the huge march turned around and headed for Civic Center Park in Berkeley and stood around there eating hamburgers and listening to music by a jug band—a group that later became known as Country Joe and the Fish—and wondering what the hell had happened. Then somebody started throwing tear gas from a rooftop and Bob Scheer was bravely telling everybody to lie down on the grass, because tear gas rises—but the jug band just stood there, petrified, with their hands and their instruments frozen in the same position as when the gas hit. It seems the jug band was high on something or other, and when the gas hit, the combination of the gas and whatever they were already up on—it petrified them and they stood there in stark stiff medias res as if they were posing for an Iwo Jima sculpture for the biggest antiwar rally in the history of the American people. The whole rally now seemed like a big half ass, with the frozen jug band the picture of how far they had gotten.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“The endearingly hopeless Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic region of Canada, found what he thought was gold, and carried fifteen hundred tons of it home on a dangerously overloaded boat only to be informed that it was worthless iron pyrites. Undaunted, Frobisher returned to Canada, found another source of gold, carted thirteen hundred tons of it back, and was informed, with presumed weariness on the part of the royal assayer, that it was the same stuff. After that, we hear no more of Martin Frobisher.”
― Bill Bryson, Made in America

“They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six”
― Bill Bryson, Made in America

“GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.”
― Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line