Aryeh

“What’s the point of quantity for quantity’s sake? Far better to aim for quality. The same critique that’s been made so many times since the industrial revolution and the advent of mass production. Saying ‘We should all make lots of friends’ is basically the same as saying ‘We should try to be the kind of people who don’t cause any friction and can more or less get along with everyone.”
― Kōtarō Isaka, The Mantis

“Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.”
― Richard Overy, Why The Allies Won

“It produced a situation where a proper sense of priority and evaluation was replaced with a chaos of demands and programmes. ‘Nobody would seriously believe’, complained a group of German engineers in 1944 based at the research centre in Rechlin, ‘that so much inadequacy, bungling, confusion, misplaced power, failure to recognise the truth and deviation from the reasonable could really exist.’56 As long as the military tail wagged the industrial dog, German war production remained inflexible, unrationalised and excessively bureaucratic”
― Richard Overy, Why The Allies Won

“It’s okay to use force on those weaker than you, as long as they’re using force on someone weaker than them.”
― Kōtarō Isaka, The Mantis