Eric Johnson > Eric's Quotes

“It made a sound,” Carl says. “Can you describe it?” “Ever put a harmonica in a blender?” “No.” “Then no, I can’t describe it,” he says.”
― Anonymous

“Yet, for many owners these little engines are contrivances from hell, cantankerous, difficult to start, and impossible to fix.”
― Paul K. Dempsey, Two-Stroke Engine Repair and Maintenance

“Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny,” he warned the Russian scientists. “The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen.”
― Walter Isaacson

“Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any U.S. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints. Cryptography is a data-protection technology, just as gloves are a hand-protection technology. Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies, and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold, and infection. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis. Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Keeping the fear stoked is big business. Those in the intelligence community know it’s the basis of their influence and power. And government contractors know it’s where the money for their contracts comes from. Writer”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Instead, successful propaganda will occupy every moment of the individual’s life: through posters and loudspeakers when he is out walking, through radio and newspapers at home, through meetings and movies in the evening. The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, requires propaganda of very long duration.”
― Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes