John Feffer > Quotes

“It was everyone for themselves. To each according to his or her avarice, from each according to his or her naiveté. The sharing economy, it turned out, was the uncaring economy.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands

“The younger generation has been a force for change in part because it refuses to accept the status quo as a given. Young people are motivated by what the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky once called the ‘energy of delusion.’ If we knew the true magnitude of a task beforehand, we wouldn’t undertake it in the first place. Thus, the older we get, and the more experience of challenge and failure that we endure, the less likely we are to attempt the impossible.”
― John Feffer, Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams

“Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. As a result, it can be hard to distinguish growing pains from death rattles. When the end comes, it’s always a shock.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands

“These days, we listen to our children, not they to us. Given what we’ve done to the planet, perhaps they have a point. Tasked with passing the baton, like hundreds of generations before us, my team has fumbled the handoff.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands

“The electorate collaborated in its own disenfranchisement. In the public’s view, all politicians were corrupt, all civil servants inept, and every government little more than a Mafia plus an army. Once the public had been persuaded to cut the state down to size, the real Mafias took over.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands

“In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands: A Novel

“Water boils most fiercely just before it disappears. And so it is, evidently, with human affairs.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands

“The enormous bloodlettings that nations visited on one another in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would surely convince all but the lunatic that appeals to motherland and fatherland had no place in a modern society.”
― John Feffer, Splinterlands: A Novel