Top 80 Clay Shirky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.”

— Clay Shirky

52. “The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.”

— Clay Shirky

53. “Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.”

— Clay Shirky

54. “Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming – not producing, not sharing – and we should say, ‘No.’”

— Clay Shirky

55. “We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.”

— Clay Shirky

56. “Upgrading one’s imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.”

— Clay Shirky

57. “How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.”

— Clay Shirky

58. “So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this – the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.”

— Clay Shirky

59. “Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.”

— Clay Shirky

60. “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

— Clay Shirky

61. “Collaboration is not an absolute good.”

— Clay Shirky

62. “Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.”

— Clay Shirky

63. “There is no news industry.”

— Clay Shirky

64. “The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.”

— Clay Shirky

65. “To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.”

— Clay Shirky

66. “Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.”

— Clay Shirky

67. “One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...”

— Clay Shirky

68. “One of the best ways to know you’re completely wrong, is to behave as if you’re complete right.”

— Clay Shirky

69. “If what you’re doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.”

— Clay Shirky

70. “The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.”

— Clay Shirky

71. “How we treat one another matters, and not just in a “it’s nice to be nice” kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.”

— Clay Shirky

72. “The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather’.”

— Clay Shirky

73. “The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?”

— Clay Shirky

74. “For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.”

— Clay Shirky

75. “In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.”

— Clay Shirky

76. “Until recently, ‘the news’ has meant to different things – events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.”

— Clay Shirky

77. “Civic participants don’t aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate...”

— Clay Shirky

78. “Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.”

— Clay Shirky

79. “Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.”

— Clay Shirky

80. “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.”

— Clay Shirky

81. “Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.”

— Clay Shirky

82. “The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody.”

— Clay Shirky

83. “An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them.”

— Clay Shirky