Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

—Henry Adams

A few years ago, I was on an airliner about to make a landing in Denver. As any experienced flyer knows, a landing at this airport is always subject to the turbulence of air coming in over the mountains. But on this day, the turbulence was extraordinary; some of the worst I have experienced as a passenger. So troublesome was it that the pilot aborted his first landing try and went around for a second effort.

Whenever something is wrong, something is too big.

—Leopold Kohr

There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep at night. Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.

—T.S. Ashton

The Industrial Revolution (1961)

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

—Daniel Goleman

If, as I strongly suspect, the American nation-state is in a terminal collapse, what is to become of its antiquated forms? Will they, like the government under the Articles of Confederation, or the Confederate States of America, simply disappear? Or will they, like Ozymandias’ empire, dissolve into the surrounding sands?

It is the business of the future to be dangerous. . . . The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Adams, Henry, 231

Albright, Madeleine, 87, 212

al-Qaeda, 149, 166

Amish, 228, 274–77

Anarchy, 57, 225–34, 274

Appleton, Josie, 250

Articles of Confederation, 259–60

Ashton, T.S., 247

Assange, Julian, 52, 105, 223–24, 255

Assassination, presidential authority to order, 9, 26, 56, 87, 145, 166–68, 211, 256–57, 267

Automobile industry, 4, 6, 26–27, 94, 98, 188