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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
“Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.
He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.”
― James Jones, quote from From Here to Eternity
“It is not the ink and the paper that matter, but the hand that holds the pen.”
― quote from The Paladin Prophecy
“For the love of men like Fitzpiers is unquestionably of such quality as to bear division and transference. He had indeed once declared, though not to her, that on one occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time. If this were true, his differed from the highest affection as the lower orders of the animal world differ from advanced organisms, partition causing not death but a multiplied existence.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from The Woodlanders
“...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“I love you, but I don’t know how to help you. I still don’t! I’m an emotional delinquent and I say wrong things all the time, but I want to be better for you. I promise that. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re ill and it doesn’t matter if I have to give up everything, because you’re worth it. You’re worth it all because you are magnificent, you are. Magnificent and gorgeous and brilliant and kind and good and I just . . . love you, Percy. I love you so damn much.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
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