#on

And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian. ↗

— Chris Hadfield

#canadian #chief #flight #houston #i

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#fiction #organization #experience

One way to evaluate your own reputation is to think about what would be said of you at your eulogy. ↗

— Brian Koslow

#eulogy #evaluate #own #reputation #said

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders... ↗

— Stuart Archer Cohen

#experience #faith #god #hope-lost #lando

I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history. ↗

— Chris Hadfield

#bay #big #floating #forward #guitar

So without that Canadian invention we were grounded. And so that was a really important and key part of the mission and Canadians should take real pride in it. ↗

— Chris Hadfield

#canadians #grounded #important #invention #key

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents. ↗

— Ernst Haeckel

#cause #earthly #existence #favor #love

My hunger and desperation, being an actor, an out of work actor - my memory of that is as fresh as an open wound. ↗

— Griffin Dunne

#being #desperation #fresh #hunger #memory

I've been drinking tequila for a long time now, and it's never been about drinking to get drunk. I don't do that. I never drink tequila during the day, and I don't drive at night. ↗

— Sammy Hagar

#been #day #drink #drinking #drive

Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. It's now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot. ↗

— Jessica Hagedorn

#action movies #child #exploitation #film #film industry