Joshua Cooper Ramo > Quotes

“In connected systems, power is defined by both profound concentration and by massive distribution.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

“What is true for the machines all around us now is true for us too: We are what we are connected to. And mastery of that connection turns out to be the modern version of Napoleon’s coup d’oeil, the essential skill of the age. Centuries”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

“The delay that Weizenbaum named, between an effort to achieve something and its realization, is the essence of being human.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

“In our age of connection, every one of us is a node. We sit on that tense, stretched surface between center and periphery. When we say Connection changes the nature of an object, this is the exact balance we have to contemplate.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

“In the nineteenth century the biggest threat to humanity was pneumonia,” he continued. “In the twentieth century it was cancer. The illness that will mark our era, and particularly the start of the twenty-first century, is insanity. Or, we can say, spiritual disease.” He paused. “This next century is going to be especially turbulent. It has already begun. And when I say ‘insanity’ and ‘spiritual disease,’ I don’t only mean inside the minds of individuals. Politics, military, economics, education, culture, and medicine—all these will be affected.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

“Every important historical moment is marked by these sorts of shifts to new models of living, which expand in velocity and complexity well past what the current ways of thinking can handle. Our moment is no exception. And usually the source of the greatest historical disasters is that so few people at the time either recognize or understand the shift. Artists, with their tuned instincts for the new, often do. This is, at least partly, why their hearts sometimes seem to break as history collides with their lives.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

“The main lesson is that just because something is too terrible to contemplate doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

“the progress of violence always reasserted itself. The love of martial life seems to be an unquenchable human instinct”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

“He who does not engage in battle is likely to defeat the enemy.”
― Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It