Jeremy Rifkin Quotes

“The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled 'genetically engineered', the public will shy away and won't take them.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Here we are 17 years later. Those agencies never did come through.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

The world's environment can no longer handle beef.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

— Jeremy Rifkin

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world.

— Jeremy Rifkin

Today we are raised with the notion that to be secure is to be financially autonomous. Amassing wealth is viewed as the primary rite of passage to a secure, autonomous existence.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Using less of the Earth's resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.

— Jeremy Rifkin

The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an ... evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against thier fellow human beings.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“In the 21st century, hundreds of millions-and eventually billions-of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The EU Constitution is something new in human history. Though it is not as eloquent as the French and U.S. constitutions, it is the first governing document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness. The language throughout the draft constitution speaks of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

Companies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that.

— Jeremy Rifkin

“We're creating multiple personas. We're creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as works of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don't see ourselves as ever completed. We are in-formation.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“What type of new economical system can organize this system? There is another sector in our life, that we rely on every single day, that are absolutely essential: the social commons, the social economy. It is all the activity we engage in to create social capital. It doesn't create capital market. Social commons is growing faster than the market place. It is growing faster than the market place. The social commons include any activity that is deeply social and collaborative.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“We need a change in consciousness to go with this technology platform. We need a new narrative: we need to shift from geopolitics to biosphere consciousness in one generation. The biosphere is understood here as what goes from the biosphere to the depths of the ocean 40 miles where all living beings interact with all chemicals to create a very complex choreography that we call "life on earth". That is biosphere that is our indivisible community.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Deep play precedes deep work.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

“It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.

— Jeremy Rifkin