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

Make the important interesting.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

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.

For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.

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.

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

I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's 'two-step' authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar.

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.

I've learned that I need to spell out, even in cases seemingly so blatant, that in fact I am not taking this at face value and am being 'sarcastic.'

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

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.

No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.

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.

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.

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

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.

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.

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.

Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.

But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.

The Prophet defeated the enemies of Islam even when he and his followers were small in number.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

There are no enemies in science, professor. Only phenomena to study.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Keep your enemies in front of you.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Many have had their greatness made for them by their enemies.

It is not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose.

Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind.

I'm just grateful to be on this planet. I have no enemies that I know of. I'm just the guy who makes happy.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

We are at war with enemies that still have the intent to do further damage to Americans at home and abroad.

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.

Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies.

Not only the bull attacks his enemies with curved horn, but also the sheep, when harmed fights back.