Gavin Esler Quotes

Globalization is the speed of light.

Globalization cannot take shape without the speed of light.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from all over the world. And the Internet is really developed in China. We get news from all over the world.

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then.

Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

Globalisation has made us more vulnerable. It creates a world without borders, and makes us painfully aware of the limitations of our present instruments, and of politics, to meet its challenges.

During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.

It was government investment that led to the creation of the Internet.

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.

The railway, the steamship, and there telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the people of the earth. The nations are coming our of their isolation, and distances which separated the different races are rapidly giving way before the extension of communication.

Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.

Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world's diversity and represents the finest in human achievements.

In a modern and innovative society, where advancements are plentiful and communication is instantaneous, science and technology are a part of everyday life.

Communications are making this one world. Back in the day, 400-500 years ago, nobody knew what anyone else was doing. It's on the 6 O'Clock news now. Now we can say, Oh, that's the way they live. Oh, they do that!! Opportunities, the chance to bring about change, it's all based on communication. Communication and jet planes.

I think that mass communications as well as mass travel have made the whole world available to us in ways that they haven't been. As with any kind of freedom, the more of it that one has the greater the need for limit and restraint. But I think that it's a nice challenge to be saddled with.

I think the whole progress over the last two or three millennia has been entirely dependent on ideas and techniques and commodities and people moving from one part of the world to another. It seems difficult to take an anti-globalization view if one takes globalization properly in its full sense.

A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.