Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in "systems" cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.

I think it's darkness before the dawn, because the next evolution is going to be a consciousness evolution instead of a communication revolution.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.

Social change can be seen as a mosaic, taking that which is broken and creating something new.

I was a very early believer in the idea of convergence.

Even IBM can't stand in the way of progress... for more than a decade.

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them.

The way communication works is changing.

Horse-and-Carriage diplomacy, like governance by crowned heads selected by accident of birth, proved wholly inadequate to address a crisis of the Electric Age.

There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will.

Every industrial revolution brings along a learning revolution.

We're witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It's already happening. And I think that the good news is that it's coming just in time.

A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.

We've reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.

Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.

The paperless office is possible, but not by imitating paper. Note that the horseless carriage did not work by imitating horses.

To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

Printer's ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press.