400 pages
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“Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“The free flow of information has become so important to all of us that in 2011 the United Nations declared “access to the Internet” a fundamental human right.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Quite simply, good news doesn’t catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“if everyone on Earth wants to live like a North American, then we’re going to need five planets’ worth of resources to do”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Today most poverty-stricken Americans have a television, telephone, electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Most Africans do not. If you transferred the goods and services enjoyed by those who live in California’s version of poverty to the average Somalian living on less than a $1.25 a day, that Somalian is suddenly fabulously rich.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear. But this has an immediate impact on”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“In hundreds of studies, researchers have consistently found that we overestimate our own attractiveness, intelligence, work ethic, chances for success”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“There are 2.7 billion people in the developing world without access to financial services”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“All told, according to the United Nations, poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“It’s incredible,” he says, “this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“the true promise of abundance was one of creating a world of possibility: a world where everyone’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Right now, in America, 70 percent of our water is used for agriculture, yet 50 percent of the food produced gets thrown away.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Today Americans living below the poverty line are not just light-years ahead of most Africans; they’re light-years ahead of the wealthiest Americans from just a century ago. Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning. This may not seem like much, but one hundred years ago men like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the richest on the planet, but they enjoyed few of these luxuries.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Africa has 1.3 percent of the world’s health workers caring for 25 percent of the global disease burden.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Decentralized means learning cannot easily be curtailed by autocratic governments and is considerably more immune to socioeconomic upheaval.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Slingshot, for the technology that David used to bring down Goliath.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“2020, nearly 3 billion people will be added to the Internet’s community.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“When you talk to the experts about developing new technology to provide clean drinking water for the developing world, they’ll tell you that—with four billion people making less than two dollars a day—there’s no viable business model, no economic model, and no way to finance development costs. But the twenty-five poorest countries already spend twenty percent of their GDP on water. This twenty percent, about thirty cents, ain’t much, but do the math again: four billion people spending thirty cents a day is a $1.2 billion market every day. It’s $400 billion a year. I can’t think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year. And you don’t have to do a market study to find out whether there’s a need. It’s water. There’s a need!”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Toilets account for 31 percent of all water use in America.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“Most of today’s educational systems are built upon the same learning hierarchy: math and science at the top, humanities in the middle, art on the bottom. The reason for this is because these systems were developed in the nineteenth century, in the midst of the industrial revolution, when this hierarchy provided the best foundation for success. This is no longer the case. In a rapidly changing technological culture and an ever-growing information-based economy, creative ideas are the ultimate resource. Yet our current educational system does little to nourish this resource.”
― quote from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
“I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Holy the Firm
“There are many reasons for a person to lie, but to have a reason to tell the truth, you must have deep belief. And great courage.”
― Susan Campbell Bartoletti, quote from The Boy Who Dared
“Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.”
― Will Durant, quote from The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
“The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Lives of Girls and Women
“To promote trade along these routes, Mongol authorities distributed an early type of combined passport and credit card. The Mongol paiza was a tablet of gold, silver, or wood larger than a man’s hand, and it would be worn on a chain around the neck or attached to the clothing. Depending on which metal was used and the symbols such as tigers or gyrfalcons, illiterate people could ascertain the importance of the traveler and thereby render the appropriate level of service. The paiza allowed the holder to travel throughout the empire and be assured of protection, accommodations, transportation, and exemption from local taxes or duties.”
― Jack Weatherford, quote from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
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