Lech Walesa Quotes

Technology helped end communism by bringing in information from the outside.

In a world of cell phones and satellite feeds - a world in which the president can sit in the White House situation room and watch a military action unfold on the other side of the world - it is not realistic to expect TV news to be anything but what it has become: a ceaseless flow of words and images that may or may not be accurate.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

I really chess-play culture shifts. I'm really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That's what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

We have collapsed distances, taken down walls, and spread information.

If formerly restrictive regimes can be persuaded to see the free flow of information not as a threat to the power of sovereign states, but as the creator of a viable economic infrastructure and a population incentivised to take advantage of the new economy, the next century will be promising indeed.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

With the revolution in information technology, with the revolution in transport technologies, I think just geography has lost its all significance.

I do believe that with more worldwide influences, the coming of the internet age and digital media, the flow of information is far greater, and people's understanding can expand more easily.

Nothing we do in this great capital can change the fact that factories or information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye... Nothing can change the fact that technology can be adopted, once created, by people all across the world and then rapidly adapted in new and different ways by people who have a little different take on the way that technology works.

The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China.

This [the advent of radio] was the first time in the history of mankind that people in different places heard the same thing at the same time.

You can’t blame the message on the medium, not exactly. But maybe, all things considered, arming everyone with pocket supercomputers, and then filtering most of human experience through social-media feedback loops, wasn’t the greatest idea…however glorious modern communications may be, they’ve also empowered a cast of goons, crooks and jihadists to build audiences and influence world-wide.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

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.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

Yevtushenko is a high member of his country's establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers.

Our computers have become windows through which we can gaze upon a world that is virtually without horizons or boundaries.

When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives - some for better, some for worse.

Let me see the 'Cuban missiles on the island' picture. Trump needs to see it before networks need to see it.

I'm much more optimistic about this next generation because this is the first global generation.