Global Uniformity Quotes

I don't think it's any different if I'm in the U.S. or in London. I look at operations globally.

The infrastructure we provide is the same in a remote town in Africa or New York or an archipelago in Sweden: we use the same system, and the chips inside the phone are the same.

We try to respond as closely as we can to the nature of each city, to the traditions, to their expectations. I don't believe that architects should be imposing their style or their plans on every city in the world.

In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.

It's not going to be true that every country has the same technological possibilities, but there is no reason why it might not be more or less true. Broadly, that the idea that the same technologies should be available everywhere seems to me very plausible.

Everywhere - all over Africa and South America - you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul. This is the prison this planet is being turned into.

I'd love to say fashion faux pas differ from country to country, but they don't.

I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.

...because of forced globalization, there's a clear trend these days towards uniformity. This trend comes largely from the ever-greater concentration of power in the hands of large media groups.

It is a platitude to say that the world is diverse, ... Nevertheless, despite this diversity starting us in the face, the human mentality has continually resisted understanding and accepting it. Our mentality shows an absolutist, standardizing tendency; it demands sameness and uniformity from everything, everywhere, that only our culture, our values should count. We deem them the only perfect and universal ones, without asking others what they think. And herein lies the world's great contradiction, the contradiction between its actual, objectively existing diversity and the stubborn desire of the human mind to substitute it with a vision of a unified, indisputably homogeneous world. How many conflicts—including the bloodiest ones—have had their roots in this irreconcilable contradiction!

The world is the same everywhere.