Top 60 Jeremy Rifkin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Deep play precedes deep work.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

2. “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?”

— Jeremy Rifkin

3. “Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

4. “Basic income is not a utopia, it’s a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

5. “What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

6. “The hydrogen economy will make possible a vast redistribution of power, with far-reaching consequences for society. Today’s centralized, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies and utilities, could become obsolete.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

7. “The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

8. “Starvation does not occur because of a world food shortage. If everyone ate a vegetarian, or better still, a vegan diet there would be enough food for everyone. The only sane way forward is to grow food for humans rather than to feed it to farmed animals...”

— Jeremy Rifkin

9. “Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

10. “The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

11. “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

12. “Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

13. “We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

14. “We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

15. “Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I’m sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

16. “We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it’s going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

17. “The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?”

— Jeremy Rifkin

19. “What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

20. “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

21. “The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

22. “We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

23. “We are entering a new phase in human history – one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

24. “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

25. “Even though the transformation of energy, in all of its various forms, is the very basis of all economic activity, only a tiny fraction of economists have even studied thermodynamics. And only a handful of individuals inside the profession have attempted to redefine economic theory and practice based on the energy laws.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

26. “One thing I’ve learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There’s no fait accompli to any of this.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

27. “We are hopeful that you will want to visit our planet in the near future. We are in the process of restoring our environment to its original grandeur, and hope to have completed the task before your RSVP.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

28. “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.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

29. “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.”56.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

30. “The position I took at the time was that we hadn’t really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

31. “A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won’t stop insects from moving across boundaries. That’s absurd.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

32. “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

33. “It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there’s no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

34. “If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won’t kill your corn.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

35. “In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn’t have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

36. “What I’m suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

37. “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

38. “The laws of thermodynamics tell us something quite different. Economic activity is merely borrowing low-entropy energy inputs from the environment and transforming them into temporary products and services of value. In the transformation process, often more energy is expended and lost to the environment than is embedded in the particular good or service being produced.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

39. “Every religion holds forth the promise of either defeating time, escaping time, overcoming time, reissuing time, or denying time altogether. We use our religions as vehicles to enter the state of nirvana, the heavenly kingdom, or the promised land. We come to believe in reincarnation, rebirth, and resurrection as ways of avoiding the inevitability of biological death.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

40. “Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

41. “We’re creating multiple personas. We’re creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as works of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don’t see ourselves as ever completed. We are in-formation.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

42. “Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

43. “The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

44. “Today we are raised with the notion that to be secure is to be financially autonomous. Amassing wealth is viewed as the primary rite of passage to a secure, autonomous existence.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

45. “It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don’t require capitalism.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

46. “The extension of the empathic bond is the social glue to establishing a global network of millions of human beings. It’s probably not surprising that in the most technologically advanced countries, where self-expression is high, the older theological consciousness, with its emphasis on strict external codes, the communal bond, and a hierarchically organized command and control, is losing its hold. Religious hierarchies make less and less sense in a fl at, networked world.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

47. “The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

48. “You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

49. “The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table.”

— Jeremy Rifkin

50. “I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.”

— Jeremy Rifkin