Dark Age America Quotes

“A glance back over our past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause but by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“Concorde fallacy,” the conviction that it’s less wasteful to keep on throwing money into a failing project than to cut your losses and do something else.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“Listen to the insults being flung around in the political controversies of the present day—the thieving rich, the shiftless poor, and the rest of it—and notice how many of them amount to claims that wealth that ought to belong to one group of people is being unfairly held by another.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“Thus the tired fantasy of cheap, abundant nuclear power needs to be buried alongside the Eisenhower-era propagandists who dreamed it up in the first place.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“have no way of knowing what combination of external pressures and personal failings led that physician to conceal a less costly cure from my friend and keep her on expensive and ineffective drugs with a gallery of noxious side effects instead, but from outside the walls of the office, it certainly looked like a callous betrayal of whatever ethics the medical profession might still have left—and again, the view from outside is the one that counts.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead