“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

“So I want to thank the Pentagon, the Soviet Union and the military-industrial complex from the bottom of my heart. Without them, I could never have become the man I am today.”

“[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.”

“It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen”

“If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.”

“Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it.”