Shifting Power Quotes

'Free' is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.

I think there has been a long-running notion in the West that Asia was a continent of people that were really conquerable. That people from Asia were weak, they were small in all ways - including physically small, geopolitically small, economically small - all of which are changing, of course.

The Industrial Revolution caused a centuries-long shift in power to the West; globalization is now shifting the balance again.

The major economies are not American anymore. They are Asian and South American.

The British happened to the rest of the world. Now the world happens to Britain.

You don’t know today which country is going to matter in three years

A new world order is taking shape so fast that governments as well as private citizens find it difficult just to absorb the gallop of events.

Sometimes I say in France: Europe is no more the center of the world - and the United States, neither. We have other key players on the international stage: China, of course; but also Brazil, India and South Africa. And their influence is very, very strong.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.

For me, the future isn't coming from the USA, like it was before.

No one, no single center, can today command the world. No single group of countries can do it. Under the current U.S. president, I don't think we can fundamentally change the situation as it is developing now. It is dangerous. The world is experiencing a period of growing global disarray.

It's silly for me to raise expectations too much, but I think I'm right on the basic trend, which is shifting power to consumers.

The world is not going into concentric blocs of power. It is actually going into a diffusion of power with more centres of decision-making than ever in human civilisation. That requires you to place yourself in far more hubs of power than ever before.

If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.

Neither nor Stalin saw the point of including an enfeebled, half-occupied, riven China. China would serve as a symbolic marker for the future; the world he [FDR] imagined would not forever be dominated by whites.

What frustrates U.S. officials is that China sometimes seems more comfortable accommodating a strong United States, as it did in past decades, than partnering with an America that's less dominant.

It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.

The nation that is supreme above all others during one age, will be eclipsed by another in the next age.

Probably the biggest thing about the shaping of our future is that it won’t be shaped in the United States.

The people who used to hold the purse strings were a select group of white, middle-aged men, but that's changing, and the more it continues to change, the more we'll see inclusive stories get told.

Having viewed Europe as an extension and projection of itself, France now finds Europe developing a mind and identity of its own which embraces France but is not controlled by France.