“This left the engineers moving the rocket and its wheeled support structure in the fashion of the ancient Egyptians. They laid down a series of wooden planks and rolled the rocket across them, grabbing the last piece of wood from the back and running it forward in a continuous cycle.”
― Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
― Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
“I told Elon we could put another engine on there, but I was really, really frustrated and just tired and mad and was kinda short with Elon. I said, ‘We can put another fucking thing on there, but I’ve blown up enough shit today.’ He said, ‘Okay, all right, that’s fine. Just calm down. We’ll do it again tomorrow.”
― Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
― Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
“For a second time in less than a decade, the United States, Kennedy worried, instead of retreating to its fortress America, building up its domestic economy, and constructing an impregnable military defense, was on the brink of launching a wasteful, quixotic, and potentially deadly quest “to establish liberal democracy throughout the world.”
― The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
― The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
“People are not embracing Communism as Communism, but they are discontented, insecure and unsettled and they embrace anything that looks like it might be better than what they have to endure. . . . It is very easy for anybody who has a job and is getting along all right to cry for democracy . . . but if you cannot feed your children and you do not know where the next meal is coming from, nobody knows what kind of freak you will follow.”13”
― The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
― The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
“By then Einstein had finally discovered what was fundamental about America: it can be swept by waves of what may seem, to outsiders, to be dangerous political passions but are, instead, passing sentiments that are absorbed by its democracy and righted by its constitutional gyroscope. McCarthyism had died down, and Eisenhower had proved a calming influence. “God’s own country becomes stranger and stranger,” Einstein wrote Hans Albert that Christmas, “but somehow they manage to return to normality. Everything—even lunacy—is mass produced here. But everything goes out of fashion very quickly.”9 Almost”
― Einstein: His Life and Universe
― Einstein: His Life and Universe
William Barksdale’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at William Barksdale’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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