John Christensen

“There is just enough time to complete the preparation of a lander,” we concluded after summarizing the situation, and the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess were nearly nil: we entered the solar system, we hit our marks, people yelled at us, we learned some history, we became disenchanted with civilization, we ran out of fuel.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“Fine.” Desjani sighed. “Admiral, I recommend we get our intelligence officer up here to see if he can craft lovely poems for the singing spider wolves.”
― Jack Campbell, Leviathan

“I don’t discount that in the end, everything I do, say, write and am will amount to a whole lot of not much; I just don’t think it’s a relevant metric. The relevant metric is: Have I constructed a life that gives me happiness, allows me to give happiness, and allows for this life to have meaning within its admittedly limited context? If I am succeeding in this particular metric, I think I’m doing pretty well.”
― John Scalzi, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

“In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.”
― Jesse Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives