Quotes to hang a story on

[robkelk]

"From the ground, the sky looks very big and very empty. But when you get up there in your little tin can Ford zipping around at 20,000ft you'll learn that it's very small and very full of things that're very big and very full, which are traveling very fast and are very hard to spot, and that it would be very bad indeed to hit one of them. This isn't a public road up here. If you come up here and fuck around and ignore The Rules you will hit something, and chances are that something will be full of innocent people who won't appreciate having their morning coffee being interrupted by them being suddenly catapulted into cold thin air going 500 kilometres per hour. And if you through some dumb miracle manage to survive ramming an airliner, you can bet there'll be a dozen different government quangos each wanting to take a big wet legal bite out of your scorched and bloodied arse, followed afterwards by the relatives and families of the recently deceased.

There are Rules in the Sky. And every single one of them came about because this one time, someone did something, and because that someone did that something a whole bunch of other someones got killed. So, unless you want to commit mass manslaughter, read this here handy guide and learn the rules. first And if you can't do that, do everyone a favour maybe consider saving a lot of lives and us the bother of cleaning up your mess by buying passage on a starliner instead."

---- "So you want to Fly a Car"

This is something that Convention Authority bureaucrat Rob Donaldson could have written, if you replace "quangos" with "agencies" (because I'm... er, he's from Canada.)

Oh, and there would be a few other versions with the same message, with wording changes for audiences made up of more- or less-sensitive ears.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012