James Fallows

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

“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.”

“Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Make the important interesting.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”