Peter Diamandis Quotes

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

What is the world coming to?

I'm not a 'dystopian, futuristic master': I'm a schnook walking the street. It's an insane reality we're living in, and I'm just trying to translate it for myself.

The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically.

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

You know, we live in a crazy world, I have to say.

I believe history of humankind has always faced challenges. I don't think that any other period in history was less problematic then the one in which we live.

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

Transformation in the nature of work tend to brings wrenching social changes in their wake.

A week is a long time in politics. A month is an eternity.

The kind of problems we're facing now, no government can fix.

American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history.

We live in times of wonderful technology and crappy politics. The task before us now is not to let the latter destroy the former.

Much of the history of the 21st century, for good or ill, will be written in Asia.

Forty-eight hours is a long time in politics

We’ve had plenty of populist figures in our past, but they had a different degree of substance than Mr. Trump. William Jennings Bryan [the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900 and 1908] came out of a period like today. The industrial revolution was like our tech revolution and globalization. The pace of life had sped up and made people anxious. Telegrams and telephones were fast. Immigration was huge. And Bryan’s supporters, like Trump’s, were fearful about the way the country was changing.

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

I think that's something that's hard for this country to address, is what the real issues are and coming to the point where we can admit that these are issues. Once we admit that, we can deal with it, we can fix them, and we can make this country and these communities a better place.