Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the pitfalls of overindulgence in digital communication and writing.
P. J. O'Rourke emphasizes that in the realm of cyber-assisted authorship, there is a tendency for writers to sacrifice quality for speed and quantity. He compares this behavior to rambling and going off-topic, suggesting that such tendencies detract from effective communication and thoughtful writing.
In practice
In a workshop on effective writing, this quote can be used to urge participants to focus on clarity over churn.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
My father worked for the same firm for 12 years. They fired him and replaced him with a tiny gadget that does everything my father does, only much better. The depressing thing is my mother ran out and bought one
The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.
There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.
If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.
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