Leon Palafox

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“the increase in very high incomes and very high salaries primarily reflects the advent of “supermanagers,” that is, top executives of large firms who have managed to obtain extremely high, historically unprecedented compensation packages for their labor.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“During the heat of the space race in the 1960s, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ballpoint pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of approximately $1 million US. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier