Benjamin Barber Quotes

#1. 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

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

Benjamin Barber

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. How is it that when we see politics permeate every life sector we call it totalitarianism and when we see religion everywhere we call it theocracy, but when commerce dominates everything we call it liberty?

Benjamin Barber

#8. 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

#9. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth. Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster.

Benjamin Barber

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

Benjamin Barber

#11. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.

Benjamin Barber

#12. Injuries too well remembered cannot heal.

Benjamin Barber

#13. 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