James Fallows

Journalist

1949-08-02

Quotes by James Fallows

• Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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

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