Jerry Pournelle Quotes

The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.

I remember things that happened sixty years ago, but if you ask me where I left my car keys five minutes ago, that's sometimes a problem.

Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.

I did know once, only I've sort of forgotten.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.

I have always been a little bit forgetful.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a "time out" from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this "time out."

I said, 'The nice thing about Alzheimer's is you get to hide your own Easter eggs.'

No matter how many vitamins you take, how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys, your hair and your memory.

Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never happened? Will none of the things you saw or thought or dreamed matter?

And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.

The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.