“Governments are nothing more than elaborate Rube Goldberg apparatuses, operating with absurd inefficiency. Why walk ten steps when you can make it there in a hundred?”

“america...is the interplay of three hundred million rube goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday”

“Dr. S didn’t notice. “Do you remember the cartoons of Rube Goldberg? An inventor of the most ludicrous contraptions. You know: a lever is pulled, causing a boot to kick a dog, whose bark motivates a hamster to run on a wheel which winds a pulley that raises a gate that releases a bowling ball and so on? Until, at the end, finally, the machine does something incredibly mundane, like making a piece of toast. Yes? Well, as it turns out, that’s the world. All these incredibly complex, inscrutably intertwined Rube Goldberg machines that can only be seen in retrospect when something happens.”

“It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.”

“You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.”

“When you never give up, failure becomes nothing more than a stepping stone to success”