2020 New Year

Quotations selected from books read; youtube speakers and selections of quotations via Google.

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” ~ Erich Fromm

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“A primary justification for a basic income is social justice”.  – Guy Standing

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.” ~ Erich Fromm

“I love information.  I can never get enough.  I get bored easily.”  ~ Eric Topol

“Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people – one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.”  ~ Eric Topol

“Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.” ~ George Friedman

“One of the great famines in human history took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [At the same time] Western journalists were reporting how marvelously Chinese society was working. We know so little [about what happens in China].” ~ George Friedman

“Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.” ~ George Friedman

“The thing you have to remember is, oil and gas are commodities, and the more we use them the more the price goes up, like any commodity. Solar, wind – they are technologies, so the more you use them, the more the price goes down.” ~ Thomas Friedman

“The threat of environmental crisis is the ‘international disaster key’ to unlock the New World Order.” ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.” ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

“When future generations judge those who came before them on environmental issues, they may conclude “they didn’t know”: let us not go down in history as the generations who knew, but didn’t care” ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ~ George Orwell

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” ~ George Orwell

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.  ~ John Steinbeck

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.  They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themseles an unrecorded, unanalysed thought.  And that’s a problem because privacy matter, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be”.  ~ Edward Snowden

“Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite.  Today we’re tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigaged.  We don’t have an inquiry into it.   ~ Edward Snowden.

“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” ~ Aristotle

There is a saying that if you get something for free, you should know that you’re the product. It was never more true than in the case of Facebook and Gmail and YouTube. You get free social-media services, and you get free funny cat videos. In exchange, you give up the most valuable asset you have, which is your personal data. Yuval Noah Harari
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/yuval-noah-harari-quotes

“The last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”  ~ Yuval Noah Harari, 21 lessons for the 21st Centuary

“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within’.  Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness.  Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxtoycin.”  ~ Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, A brief History of Humankind

We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don’t have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it’s climate change or whether it’s technological disruption. Yuval Noah Harari
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/yuval-noah-harari-quotes

“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.” ~ Noam Chomsky

“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” ~ Noam Chomsky

“A lot of the diagnosis and monitoring functions will be done through little devices – smartphones – by the patient with computer assistance. So it’s a real big change in the model of how we render healthcare.” ~ Eric Topol

“I have had my genome fully sequenced and have learned a great deal about which medications I would respond to and which might or would induce major side effects, along with knowing many medical conditions for which I’m particularly susceptible.” ~ Eric Topol

“The IP system is an artificial construcct that excessively rewards ownes of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inveentions and ideas, that in many cases, are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research”.  ~ Guy Standing

Across Europe, not just in the U.K., the old Beveridge and Bismarckian variants of the welfare state have been dismantled.  In their place has been erected a mish-mash of means-tested, behaviour-tested social assistance, with a growing tendency to force young unemployed into workfare schemes, which are helping to depress real wages.  ~ Guy Standing

“I don’t see basic income as a panacea, but we must have a new income distribution system.  The old one has broken down irretrievably.  ~ Guy Standing.

“If I care for an elderly relative without payment, it is not work, it is not counted in national income, and, as it is not labour, it is not counted as work.  Should my neighbour pay me to do precisely the same tasks, it would contribute to economic growth.”  ~ Guy Standing

“What distinguishes a commons is that it is not private property, does not have a price, and is oriented towards ‘use value’ rather than ‘exchange value.’  It does not exist to generate profits.”  ~ Guy Standing

“The word “collective” is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word “cooperative” means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form.” ~ Richard D. Wolff

“Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.” ~ Chris Hedges

“It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.” ~ Chris Hedges

“A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.” ~ Chris Hedges

“The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.” ~ Erich Fromm