James Fallows Quotes

#1. What the (totalitarian) government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of the nuisance that people generally won't bother.

James M. Fallows

#2. Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

James Fallows

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

James Fallows

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

James Fallows

#11. Up or out greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.

James Fallows

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

James Fallows

#13. 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

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

James Fallows

#15. 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

#16. When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

James Fallows

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

James Fallows

#18. 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

#19. Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.

James Fallows

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

James Fallows

#29. 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

#30. The shadow that comes with postmodernism is a profound self-involvement. We lose all perspective on the collective endeavors that have made the extraordinarily lives we live possible.

James M. Fallows

#31. Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.

James Fallows

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Make the important interesting.

James Fallows

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

James Fallows