James M. Fallows > Quotes

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

“Economists use the term “path dependence” to convey the simple idea that choices you made yesterday affect the choices available to you today.”
― James M. Fallows, China Airborne

“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 Fallows

“What the (totalitarian) government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of the nuisance that people generally won't bother.”
― James Fallows

“We quickly noticed traits that we eventually learned to associate with towns on the rise. Residential buildings and new hotels. Multiple restaurants, and a brewery. Viable stores that are not part of a national chain. Corporate headquarters that have moved downtown. A nearby college student base,”
― James M. Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

“Their value is in giving citizens a sense of how today’s efforts are connected to what happened yesterday and what they hope tomorrow will bring.”
― James M. Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

“But Burlington’s big post–World War II turning point came with the arrival in the late 1950s of what eventually turned out to be one of IBM’s major semiconductor works, in the suburb of Essex Junction, just east of Burlington. At its peak, the IBM factory employed some eight thousand engineers and technical workers. Its staff fell to about three thousand (and IBM has sold the works to another company, a Silicon Valley spin-off called GlobalFoundries). But its influence on Burlington remains profound.”
― James M. Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

“Well done!....I thought this was well-written and informative.”
― James Fallows

“The Cristo Rey Columbus High School is part of what is now a twenty-eight-school network that was founded in Chicago by Jesuit priest John P. Foley in 1995. The schools are strategically located in cities with a needy urban population, a supportive local Catholic diocese, and cooperative, deep-pocketed businesses. Columbus, as an energetic, creative, and generous city, fit the bill perfectly.”
― James M. Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

“(The next four whitest are, in order, Maine, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and Iowa, a reminder that the crucial two first contests in a presidential primary are the fourth and fifth whitest states in the union.)”
― James M. Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

“Everywhere we went, Deb and I saw the imprint of the great national undertakings of the past. An astonishing amount of the public architecture of twenty-first-century America was laid down in a few Depression years in the 1930s, bu the millions of people employed by the Works Progress Administration. The small airports we landed at were the result of midcentury defense-and-transportation bulding projects, as were the interstates we flew above. The libraries we found almost everywhere were the result of both public and private investment. The grid-pattern fields of the farmland Midwest had been laid out by the rules of settlement from the earliest days of the republic. The practices that made them the most productive farmland in the world were crucially spurred by land grant universities and agricultural-research schools. The wildlands and ecosystems that have escaped development did so because of their protection as national parks or monuments.”
― James Fallows