Benjamin R. Barber Quotes

If September 11th has taught us anything, it's certainly that the world has never been so interdependent. It is impossible now to be an island of prosperity in a sea of despair.

I have long believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in.

We're now married to the world. But we keep acting like we're on a big date.

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.

In this shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical barriers.

In truth, the world is now a seamless web from which no nation, large or small, young or old, can disassociate itself. Every attitude and every action of every nation can affect the welfare and security of every other nation around the globe.

What we have seen in financial markets should bring home to us all that the central organising principle of this 21st century is interdependence. For the century just past, interdependence may have been one option among many. For the century that is to come, there is no longer an alternative.

In today's interdependent world, a threat to one becomes a menace to all. And no state can defeat these challenges and threats alone.

The world before 1914 was already a world in which the welfare of each individual nation was inextricably bound up with the prosperity of the whole community of nations.

Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.

We are now physically, politically, and economically one world and nations so interdependent that the absolute national sovereignty of nations is no longer possible.

Foreign policy is inseparable from domestic policy now. Is terrorism foreign policy or domestic policy? It's both. It's the same with crime, with the economy, climate change.

The world is a place that is so interconnected that what happens in another part of the world will impact us.

Independence ... is middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth

No nation can go to war now against another nation without going to war against all humanity. The world has become a family

We have to move from our devotion to independence, through an understanding of interdependence

We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches

For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before..

Nowhere on this planet today is there an impregnable fortress, a continent or island so distant that it can ignore all the outer world.

In an interdependent world …, the idea that American can have of the blessings of globalization but none of the burdens doesn’t add up.

No country can be an island unto itself or world unto itself. Not even the biggest country.

I know how inter-dependent the world is.

There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.

in today's world no country can be absolutely independent of another. It is a world of interdependence.

Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community.