Quotes from Charles Fishman

What NASA did for semiconductor companies was teach them to make chips of near-perfect quality, to make them fast, in huge volumes, and to make them cheaper, faster, and better with each year.

Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford

Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.

Reihm wasn't thrilled by the Moon walk that he and his colleagues had worked for years to make possible; he was thrilled by its being over

The small stuff matters. The company that became the largest and most powerful in history isn't a military contractor or a car company. It isn't the result of savvy lobbyists in Washington, or the happenstance of controlling the supply of petroleum, or some kind of cabal that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. The largest and most powerful company in history is built by each of us handing over three single dollar bills over and over again.

didn't usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age. And that is as valuable a legacy as the imagined Space Age might have been. Probably more valuable.

The electricity you use at home each day requires 250 gallons of water per person, not just more than the actual water you use at home in the kitchen and the bathroom but two-and-a-half times more.

And, of course, water is the most important substance in our lives because we ourselves are made mostly of water—men are typically 60 percent water, women are typically 55 percent water. A 150-pound man is 90 pounds of water (11 gallons).4

The typical American flushes the toilet five times a day at home, and uses 18.5 gallons (70 liters) of water, just for that.5

We want clean air, clean water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world. Yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.

Who better than Wal-Mart, after all, to make a kilowatt of electricity go twice as far, or a gallon of fuel move our trucks move three times the distance?" -Wal-Mart ad

If you know nothing about maintaining a [lawn] mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant ... the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable.

Please go back up

How many companies can say that the amount of customers who use their services second most often, and spend the second most amount of money with them, are "very negative"?

Wal-Mart benefits from the impression that globalization is some kind of unmanageable economic weather system out of the control of everyone, affecting all players with indifference, benefiting those who happened to be properly prepared.

For all the folks whose job it was to be ready for [Hurricane] Katrina, but who weren't, from the Oval Office, right down the chain of command to the New Orleans police department, Wal-Mart was a vivid reproach.

They had the lure of the Wal-Mart volume," [Jim] Wier said. "Once you get hooked on the volume, it's like getting hooked on cocaine. You've created a monster for yourself.

Wal-mart has done such a superb job of austerity, from start to finish, that austerity is all that's left.

Sometimes cheap is inexpensive. Sometimes it's cheap.

The race to the Moon