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Robert A. Heinlein
"Friday"
- ...with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever
they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of electronic
surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible—keep
underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers are
literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren't really records . . . so it is good to be alert to
opportunities to foul up the system. If you can't evade a tax, pay a little too much to confuse their
computers. Transpose digits. And so on.
- "Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization
can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while
carefully leaving the stupid ones in place. It took only a few careful 'accidents' to ruin utterly the great
Prussian military machine and turn it into a blundering mob. But this did not show until the fighting was
well under way, because stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses until the fighting starts."
- Where can you have more fun in forty minutes with your clothes on?
- The following week I went back to work, both sad and warmly happy. For the next seventeen years I
would be paying NZ$858.13 per month, or I could pay it faster. For what? I could not live at home until
it was all paid because I had to keep my job to meet those monthly payments. For what, then? Not for
sex. As I told Captain Tormey, sex is everywhere; it's silly to pay for it. For the privilege of getting my
hands into soapy dishwater, I guess. For the privilege of rolling around on the floor and being peed on
by puppies and babies only nominally housebroken.
For the warm knowledge that, wherever I was, there was a place on this planet where I could do these
things as a matter of right, because I belonged.
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