George Reilly

“burro, burrow: A /burro/ is an ass. A /burrow/ is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.”
― United Press International, UPI Stylebook & Guide To Newswriting

“I’m sweating like a glassblower’s arse.”
― Alan Parks, Bobby March Will Live Forever

“It’s the basic obstacle of artificial ecosystems. In a normal evolutionary environment, there’s enough diversity to cushion the system when something catastrophic happens. That’s nature. Catastrophic things happen all the time. But nothing we can build has the depth. One thing goes wrong, and there’s only a few compensatory pathways that can step in. They get overstressed. Fall out of balance. When the next one fails, there are even fewer paths, and then they’re more stressed. It’s a simple complex system. That’s the technical name for it. Because it’s simple, it’s prone to cascades, and because it’s complex, you can’t predict what’s going to fail. Or how. It’s computationally impossible.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War

“Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison.”
― Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise