James Fallows Quotes

34 quotes in 636 categories

• A rigid America is also weak and vulnerable, because it sacrifices its unique strength: the energy of people who think they can always make something…
• The worst kind of management seeks a single optimum, a one-scale index of efficiency, like the mindless scales of 1 to 10 for grading a…
• Up or out" greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.
• According to the Office of Technology Assessment, 3 Minuteman missiles and 7 Poseidon missiles could destroy 73 percent of oil-refining capacity in the Soviet Union.
• It is not widely known that, ever since the end of the Korean War, the United States has spent essentially the same amount of money…
• Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.
• Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.
• Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.
• Successful societies-those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world-succeed because they have found ways…
• Make the important interesting.
• Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries.
• Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.
• Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.
• For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.
• I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.
• I've learned that I need to spell out, even in cases seemingly so blatant, that in fact I am not taking this at face value…
• In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.
• No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.
• There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.
• A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you…

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