Fighting Wildfires With Robotic Planes ... Here are the opening paragraphs from the San Diego Union-Tribune article. Using the sort of small robotic aircraft flown by the military in Iraq, a NASA research team has developed techniques for launching a fleet of unmanned aircraft like a flock of birds to monitor fast-moving wildfires....
Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they’re old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors.... If they only knew that it’s enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.
—Jean Anouilh (1910–1987)
To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind of freedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)