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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

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Jeremy Rifkin
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 26
Economist
Sociologist
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More quotes by Jeremy Rifkin

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The world's environment can no longer handle beef.
Jeremy Rifkin
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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
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Deep play precedes deep work.
Jeremy Rifkin
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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.
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When you're sharing the music, you're not buying the CD. When you're sharing that video, you're not buying the TV. But we thought, really, there'd be a firewall. While near-zero marginal cost would impact virtual goods, we never thought it would move over to the physical world.
Jeremy Rifkin
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.
Jeremy Rifkin
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What's really clear to all of us in the business community is that GDP is slowing everywhere. And the reason is productivity has been declining now for 15 or 20 years all over the world. So we've got very high unemployment, and it's structural. And it's compounded by real-time climate change - that's really a game changer.
Jeremy Rifkin
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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
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Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?
Jeremy Rifkin
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Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.
Jeremy Rifkin
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You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.
Jeremy Rifkin
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Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.
Jeremy Rifkin
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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
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Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.
Jeremy Rifkin
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We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
Jeremy Rifkin
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We have come to discover what we suspect is a new political mindset emerging among a younger generation of political leaders socialized on Internet communications. Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative.
Jeremy Rifkin