Benjamin Barber Quotes

“I divide the word into learners and nonlearners. There are people who learn, who are open to what happens around them, who listen, who hear the lessons. When they do something stupid, they don't do it again. And when they do something that works a little bit, they do it even better and harder the next time. The question to ask is not whether you are a success or a failure, but whether you are a learner or a nonlearner.”

— Benjamin Barber

“By the laws of the land, people who come looking for jobs in America are illegal. But by the laws of economics, they are following the logic and laws of economics when they leave Guatemala and go to Mexico, leave Mexico and come to the U.S., leave Africa and go to Spain and Europe looking for jobs.”

— Benjamin Barber

I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures ... I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.

— Benjamin Barber

“Independence used to be the ticket for liberty. But today, security and freedom, whether it's in the Arab Spring, whether it's in Iraq or whether it's right here in the United States, means working cooperatively and interdependently with others.”

— Benjamin Barber

I divide the world into learners and non-learners.

— Benjamin Barber

“Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.”

— Benjamin Barber

“When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.”

— Benjamin Barber

“Civility is a work of the imagination, for it is through the imagination that we render others sufficiently like ourselves for them to become subjects of tolerance and respect, if not always affection.”

— Benjamin Barber

“The real lesson of 9/11 that I think we have still to learn is that this is a world of interdependence, in which all of the challenges of environment and climate change, of jobs, of disease, of war and terrorism, are cross-border problems that cannot be met one nation at a time.”

— Benjamin Barber

Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales.

— Benjamin Barber

“9/11 was a signal that we were living in a new world - a world of interdependence, a world in which people could attack the United States not from the outside, but from the inside. It was a sign that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, could watch the cathedral of capitalism at the Trade Center and the heart of its defense at the Pentagon be struck internally, not really across borders, so that borders don't matter anymore.”

— Benjamin Barber

“Injuries too well remembered cannot heal.”

— Benjamin Barber

“Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.”

— Benjamin Barber

“Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do.”

— Benjamin Barber