Paper money is bad enough, as France learned under the tutelage of the rascal John Law in the early 1700s. The nation was broke, exhausted by foolish… - James Howard Kunstler

As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved, and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in effect, that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.

The more comfortable we have become with the blandishments of industrial technology, the more complexity we are burdened with —as the and the remind us—and the more likely we are to meet the very fate we are desperately trying to avoid: our rendezvous with entropy [a euphemism for death].

Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was.