James Fallows famous quotes

Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.
-- James Fallows

#Anger #Writing #Enemy

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.
-- James Fallows

#Views #Environmental #Development

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.
-- James Fallows

#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.
-- James Fallows

#War #People #Vietnam

I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.
-- James Fallows

#Patents #Reform #Giants

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 and am being 'sarcastic.
-- James Fallows

#Sarcastic #Needs #Faces

In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.
-- James Fallows

#Transition #World #Way

No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.
-- James Fallows

#Jobs #Real #World

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.
-- James Fallows

#Environmental #Problem #Surprise

Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries.
-- James Fallows

#Country #Thinking #Might

We're now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work
-- James Fallows

#Reality #Class #Long

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 new of their lives.
-- James Fallows

#Sacrifice #Unique #Thinking

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 woman's beauty or one to four stars for a movie's appeal.
-- James Fallows

#Stars #Four

Up or out" greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.
-- James Fallows

#Jobs #Emphasis #Bureaucracy

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.
-- James Fallows

#Technology #Assessment #Oil

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 on defense, in real terms, every single year.
-- James Fallows

#Real #War #Years

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.
-- James Fallows

#People #Prejudice #Messages

Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.
-- James Fallows

#Military #World #Assumption

Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.
-- James Fallows

#Fate #People #Society

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.
-- James Fallows

#Differences #Choices #Needs

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.
-- James Fallows

#Beautiful #Order #Fans

The air that people breathe in many Chinese cities has become dangerously polluted. Their food supply is subject to constant contamination scandals. Now it appears that not merely stagnant ponds but the water people draw from deep underground is already tainted.
-- James Fallows

#Air #Cities #People

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.
-- James Fallows

#Design #Feelings #Google

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.
-- James Fallows

#Dream #Father #World

When a company is charging money for a product - as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync - you understand its incentive for sticking with that product.
-- James Fallows

#Doe #Incentives #Charging

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the 'Boston Phoenix.' I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.
-- James Fallows

#Boston #Phoenix #People

I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's 'two-step' authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar.
-- James Fallows

#Two #Google #Afar

I am about as pro-Google a person as you're going to find in the media. I've had friends at all levels of the company since its founding, and still do now.
-- James Fallows

#Media #Google #Levels

For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.
-- James Fallows

#Air #Safety #Water

Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions.
-- James Fallows

#Country #Real #Moving

Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.
-- James Fallows

#People #Chinese #Coal

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 press releases, rather than those who are.
-- James Fallows

#Talking #People #Release

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 to match individual self-interest to the collective good.
-- James Fallows

#Successful #Self #Progress

Make the important interesting.
-- James Fallows

#Interesting #Important