Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

The archetype of the dead city is a distillation of the agonies of hundreds of real cities that have been destroyed since cities and marauding armies were invented. Our only way of escape from the insanity of the collective unconscious is a collective consciousness of sanity, based upon hope and reason. The great task that faces our contemporary civilization is to create such a collective consciousness.

Everybody should, at this point, try to understand ... that we are in a D-process. The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course. If you think that restructuring the banks is going to get lending going again and you don't have to restructure the other pieces -- the mortgage piece, the corporate piece, the real-estate piece -- you are wrong.

Let's pull out the bazooka and be done with it.

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present.

The short-term needs are the opposite of what is needed in the long term.

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish or pathological or wrong.

First world shanty towns.

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

"Maybe we could" is the limit of optimism in this paper. The world ahead looks difficult.

If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump "cannot be as bad as the Great Depression." This view is wrong.

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

The whole system is warped.

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Darker days lie ahead.

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.