Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by Rutger Bregman - Page 2

Almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share.

Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organized education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment.

If I say most people are pretty decent that may sound nice and warm but actually it's really radical and subversive and that's why, all throughout history, those who have advocated a more hopeful view of human nature - often the anarchists - have been persecuted.

Contact is the best medicine against hate, racism and prejudice. It's something that we should be very wary of, the more segregation we have, the more of a problem that's going to be.

A universal basic income means not only that millions of people would receive unconditional cash payments, but also that millions of people would have to cough up thousands more in taxes to fund it. This will make basic income politically a harder sell.

Maybe utopianism is my form of religion in a world without God.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education.

A world where wages no longer rise still needs consumers. Middle-class purchasing power has been maintained through loans, loans and more loans. The Calvinistic reflex that you have to work for your money has turned into a license for inequality.

We know from scientific studies that infants as young as six months old can distinguish right from wrong and have a preference for the good over the bad. I think it's important to design our education and our schools around that insight, to bring out the best in our kids.

My life philosophy is that you need a boring private life if you want to have a more exciting public life.

We like to think that people have to work for their money.

Psychologists even have a term for this: they talk about 'mean world syndrome'. People who have just seen too much of the news have become more cynical, more pessimistic, more anxious, even more depressive. So, yeah, I think that is something you need to be wary of.

But I think 'Love, Actually' has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant's character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it's about who we really are as a species.

Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.

I know that there are many excellent arguments for a universal form of basic income. Since everyone would get it, it would remove the stigma that dogs recipients of assistance and 'entitlements'.

A lot of great things are going on. In many ways, the past 30 years have been the best in world history. But we can do much better. I prefer the word hope over optimism.

As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.

If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.

Since the 70s and the 80s you see the rise of neoliberalism. The central dogma of neoliberalism was that most people are selfish. So, we started designing our institutions around that idea, our schools, our workplaces, our democracies. The government became less and less important.

Our streets are very important for social cohesion, for feelings of safety, and we just surrendered all this to the car. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.

A lot of journalists help us to better understand the world by zooming out and sometimes zooming in on a really important case but sort of helping us to get a grasp of what are the structural forces that govern our lives and our societies and that is incredibly important.

I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous.

We so often tend to think our democracies are ruled by procedures and laws, but they are also governed by implicit rules and assumptions and one of them is the ability to feel shame - that you can be shamed.

My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we're in this together.

I've solved my phone addiction by deleting all the apps I was addicted to - email, browser - and getting my wife to add parental controls, to limit access even further.

Even if you don't care about the environment whatsoever, solar panels are really cool, and are an investment because they save money in the long run.

From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.

History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.

People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it's not enough to live our own private lives.