Richard Rogers Quotes

Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.

Technology isn't the enemy, it is our ally, but only if we adopt a new model that puts people before profit. I realize that we seem far from that model, but I have seen it in action and it is a beautiful thing. So I'm not willing to give up yet. Hope is the last thing to die.

What did you do to change the world today?

We talk a lot about building benevolent technology. Our technology reflects our values.

Social enterprise is an effective solution for social problems.

There is great potential for investments that are built around improving social, environmental, and economic conditions.

Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?

Pro-active good governance aims beyond short-term requirement keeping in mind the long-term needs such as the use of clean technology and in preparedness and mitigating climate change fallout etc.

Whatever the short term clashes between protecting the environment and eradicating poverty, medium term and long term it is clear. Unless we grow sustainably, at some point we face catastrophe

The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.

Maybe we have enough technology to save the planet but it is not enough because the people are not ready.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

I realize there are few sectors that can do what philanthropy does, which is look at big problems, take a long term view, try to develop strategies for addressing the root causes and then go about solving them.

There is little doubt that a significant part of any serious solution will require advances of technology, but that can only be part of the solution. Other major changes are necessary.

We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial.

Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable—from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems.

Education will not cure all the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible.

Sometimes we overemphasize the political system. There are other ways to make a difference. There's technology, there's media, there's business.

Development must be such that it positively transforms the lives of the common people.

Reaching a general understanding that sustainability is the ultimate issue will finally bring us face-to-face with the political challenge of forging a sustainable society during the next few decades. It is a challenge we can meet if we have the leadership and the political will to do so.

Concern for the fate of the great rivers of the earth must lead us to reflect soberly on the model of development which our society is pursuing. A purely economic and technological understanding of progress, to the extent that it fails to acknowledge its intrinsic limitations and to take into consideration the integral good of humanity, will inevitably provoke negative consequences for individuals, peoples and creation itself.

Development requires modification and transformation of the environment... the planet's capacity to support its people us being irreversibly reduced by the destruction and degradation of the biosphere and the need to understand the problem and take corrective action is becoming urgent.

As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed.

We can't impede progress in the name of environmental action that yields little for the environment and even less for our people.. and we should look at the environment as an economic opportunity.

I believe there are huge numbers of people in this country who would be willing to have radical changes in our economic and social system in order to make it a more egalitarian society and do away with homelessness and hunger and clean up the environment. But these people have no voice. They have no way of expressing themselves. Elections give them no way of expressing themselves.