David Kaplan

“Thousands of commercial airplanes using fly-by-wire technology systems lose wing and tail controls, lose cabin pressure and landing gear, lose instrument landing systems as they head violently toward the ground. One class of passenger aircraft is mercifully spared, namely the older model 747s, used by the Defense Department for its Doomsday Planes. “747 pilots still use a foot pedal and a yoke, mechanically linked to the control surfaces,” Yago tells us. “There’s no fly-by-wire technology there.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“I have a long list of strangers who have my private number, and an invitation to call, and many of them do. “Just call me when you want to talk,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s easier to pour your heart out to somebody you don’t know well, but you know they know. You know they’ve been through it. Just pick up the phone and call me.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“To reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, and before that, all the way down. The approach of this book is to show how that determinism works, to explore how the biology over which you had no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you you. And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call “free will,” they have (a) failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking beneath the surface and/or (b) erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals, and behavior.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.”
― Lao Tzu, Te-Tao Ching