Quotes by James A. Cooper

“Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.– Dwight D. Eisenhower””

“But when the character traits of innovation and creativity collide with established ideas, it doesn’t always work out well. A few years after Deep Blue, I was selected to a fourth star and headed to US Southern Command with a particular vision for the command that had evolved from a series of conversations I had had with then secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both felt that the old paradigm for a combatant command”

“There was only so much explaining to people how cooperation would keep them all from dying she could manage in a single sitting.””

“It would have worked,” she said. “If we’d cooperated, it would have worked.” “It would have been better.” “I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.””

“Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.””

“So how do you fix that?” “You don’t. It’s like saying ‘This statement is false.’ It’s just a hole in logic,” Teresa said. “I mean… isn’t it?” “Not if you play it more than once,” Colonel Ilich said. “You play it over and over and over for a really long time. Every time the other player defects, you defect the next time. And then you go back to cooperating. It’s called tit for tat. There’s a pure game theory analysis of it I can give you if you want, but you don’t need it for this.””

“After that, I sink back into myself and allow my mind to wander. Which it does, right back to my current read: a novella called The Private Club, by one of my favorite romance authors, J.S. Cooper. Mmmmm.””