Howard Rheingold Quotes

Whether you live in a big city or a small town, a call placed by a loved one, friend, or customer should go through.

Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact.

The phone company handles 84 billion calls a year-everything from kings, queens, and presidents to the scum of the earth.

Over the years, I have developed a pretty good Rolodex.

I keep a list of everyone I've ever met.

I joined MySpace in September 2003. At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight.

I have a lot of contacts, a lot of sources that I've developed over the years and I like to break this guy signs, this guy is fighting this guy, this event is happening on such a date.

What excites me is that, when things are tough, people become resourceful, and now with the Internet, social networking and the ability for people who in the past had been relatively powerless, they have tools to be able to spread ideas and organize. The urgency is there and the tools are there and I think that the possibility for really, really powerful results is there. I think it's all brewing, it's all bubbling up right now.

It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.

This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.

The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.

I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

One fault begets another; one crime renders another necessary.

The newspaper is a Bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a Biblewhich every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the mail, and thousands of missionaries, are continually dispersing. It is, in short, the only book which America has printed, and which America reads. So wide is its influence.

Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.

Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

I love the media, I live with the media.

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.

The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.

Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.

I've worked with a ginormous number of people over the years. What happens when you've been around for a while, when you run into people whose work you've seen and liked and they have seen and liked your work, there's a sense of you kind of know each other even though you don't.

You must match your music to the kind of people God wants your church to reach.... The music you use 'positions' your church in your community. It defines who you are.... It will determine the kind of people you attract, the kind of people you keep, and the kind of people you lose.

I learned from the Macarturos. I had never been at a table with a labor organizer and a playwright and a performance artist and an anthropologist and a human rights lawyer. Usually at most gatherings, it's all writers. But suddenly I was at a table with all these different people and I learned from each of them, learned from the work they're doing, learned new ways to solve my problems.

... passion, once unleashed, has a way of unleashing other passions -- a principle adhered to as firmly by the police force of any large modern city as by the Greek tragedians.