James Fallows People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It seems to be the case that for the people who actually are all in with Donald Trump - which is who knows: 35, 38, 40 per cent of the electorate - apparently nothing can dissuade them.