Top 60 Rutger Bregman Quotes

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’.

Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It’s about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working.

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.

I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.

Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.

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.

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

We’ll all remember 2020 as an historic year. And for decades, people will be able to say, remember 2020. Remember when things were really tough. Who did we rely on? I think that could impact a whole generation.

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

Basic income would give people the most important freedom: the freedom of deciding for themselves what they want to do with their lives.

The most daunting challenges of our times, from climate change to the ageing population, demand an entrepreneurial state unafraid to take a gamble.

New ideas rarely come from the moderate parties in The Hague or Washington, in Brussels or Westminster. The world’s political centres are not the breeding ground for true change, but rather where it comes home to roost.

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

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can’t explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it’s probably your own fault.

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.

This is what a crisis does: It makes you question the status quo. That doesn’t mean that after a crisis we move into some kind of utopia. But it is an opportunity for political change.

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.

The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need.

What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.

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

Children are born as emphatic and compassionate beings – so you don’t have to teach them generosity, it’s in their nature to be friendly.

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.

Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days.

As a species of animal that evolved to make connections and work together, it feels strange to suppress our desire for contact. People enjoy touching each other, and find joy in seeing each other in person – but now we have to keep our physical distance.

A Dutchman can’t easily get away from cheese. I was dropped into a cauldron of cheese when I was young.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That’s hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we’ve already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we’re going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

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 think it’s rational to assume the best in other people because most people are pretty decent.

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 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.

Since long workdays lead to more errors, shorter workdays could reduce accidents. Overtime is deadly. Tired surgeons have been found to be more prone to slip’ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.

While it won’t solve all the world’s ills – and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce – a basic income would work like venture capital for the people.

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.

A worldwide shift to a shorter working week could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint.

Since 1963, the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.

Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.

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.

I first read ‘Lord of the Flies’ as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature.

Nowadays excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.

Instead of a universal basic income, we could have a basic income guarantee. Or, as economists prefer to call it, a negative income tax.

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.

One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.

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.

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.

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

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

Literally every single sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone – internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition – was developed by researchers on the government payroll.