Top 70 Rutger Bregman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is easy to make things hard, but hard to make them easy.”

— Rutger Bregman

2. “The purpose of a shorter workweek is not so we can all sit around doing nothing, but so we can spend more time on the things that genuinely matter to us.”

— Rutger Bregman

3. “Van de mooiste dingen in het leven krijg je alleen maar meer als je ze weggeeft: vertrouwen, vriendschap, vrede.”

— Rutger Bregman

4. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”

— Rutger Bregman

5. “Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.”

— Rutger Bregman

6. “So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

— Rutger Bregman

7. “When we hole up in our own trenches, we lose sight of reality. We’re lured into thinking that a small, hate-mongering minority reflects all humankind. Like the handful of anonymous internet trolls that are responsible for almost all the vitriol on Twitter and Facebook. And even the most caustic keyboard crusader may at other times be a thoughtful friend or loving caregiver.”

— Rutger Bregman

8. “Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody.”

— Rutger Bregman

9. “When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease.”

— Rutger Bregman

10. “I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job but for a life well lived.”

— Rutger Bregman

11. “We can choose to organise our cities and states in new ways that benefit everyone. The curse of civilisation can be lifted.”

— Rutger Bregman

12. “The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: Things could be different.”

— Rutger Bregman

13. “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies.37 The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.38.”

— Rutger Bregman

14. “If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.”

— Rutger Bregman

15. “If we believe most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get.”

— Rutger Bregman

16. “The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.”14.”

— Rutger Bregman

17. “Greater flexibility in the workplace demands that we also create greater security. Globalization is.”

— Rutger Bregman

18. “It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.”

— Rutger Bregman

19. “Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses.”

— Rutger Bregman

20. “If you’re an avid follower of the news, it’s easy to get trapped by hopelessness. What’s the point of recycling, paying taxes and donating to charities when others shirk their duty? If you’re tempted by such thoughts, remember that cynicism is just another word for laziness. It’s an excuse not to take responsibility. Because if you believe most people are rotten, you don’t need to get worked up about injustice. The world is going to hell either way.”

— Rutger Bregman

21. “This is a book about a radical idea. An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history. At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life.”

— Rutger Bregman

22. “Some scientists even contented that the first person who will live to celebrate their 1000th birthday, has already been born.”

— Rutger Bregman

23. “For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change. In the 1950s we couldn’t conceive that the advent of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and, above all, washing machines would help prompt women to enter the workplace in record numbers, and yet they did.”

— Rutger Bregman

24. “Inequality? The countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest workweeks.”

— Rutger Bregman

25. “It seems we have to face a painful fact. ‘The mechanism that makes us the kindest species,’ says Brian Hare, puppy expert, ’also makes us the cruelest species on the planet.’1 People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.”

— Rutger Bregman

26. “Free money works. Already, research has correlated unconditional cash disbursements with reductions in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and truancy, and with improved school performance, economic growth, and gender equality.13 “The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.”

— Rutger Bregman

27. “But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.”

— Rutger Bregman

28. “We are trained to see selfishness everywhere.”

— Rutger Bregman

29. “The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. None, nothing, nada. Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities.”

— Rutger Bregman

30. “If there’s one thing that we capitalists have in common with the communists of old, it’s a pathological obsession with gainful employment. Just as Soviet-era shops employed “three clerks to sell a piece of meat,” we’ll force benefit claimants to perform pointless tasks, even if it bankrupts us.”

— Rutger Bregman

31. “Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries.”

— Rutger Bregman

32. “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy.”

— Rutger Bregman

33. “Any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.”

— Rutger Bregman

34. “Recently, the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth.22 Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that even rich people suffer when inequality becomes too great. They, too, become more prone to depression, suspicion, and myriad other social difficulties.”

— Rutger Bregman

35. “Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.”

— Rutger Bregman

36. “Take a Somalian toddler. She has a 20% probability of dying before reaching the age of five. Now compare: American frontline soldiers had a mortality rate of 6.7% in the Civil War, 1.8% in World War II, and 0.5% in the Vietnam War.30 Yet we won’t hesitate to send that Somalian toddler back if it turns out her mother isn’t a “real” refugee. Back to the Somalian child-mortality front.”

— Rutger Bregman

37. “Last and best of all, we’ve entered the most peaceful age ever.”

— Rutger Bregman

38. “The reasons for hope, by contrast, are always provisional. Nothing has gone wrong – yet. You haven’t been cheated – yet.”

— Rutger Bregman

39. “Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”

— Rutger Bregman

40. “The world benefits more from continuity than from continual change,’ he asserts.”

— Rutger Bregman

41. “Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.”

— Rutger Bregman

42. “Time heals all wounds, except unemployment.”

— Rutger Bregman

43. “Dictators and despots, governors and generals-they all to often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.”

— Rutger Bregman

44. “Emancipation of women? Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender-equality rankings.”

— Rutger Bregman

45. “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30.”

— Rutger Bregman

46. “Productive women, seniors, or immigrants won’t displace men, young adults, or hardworking citizens from their jobs. In fact, they create more employment opportunities. A bigger workforce means more consumption, more demand, more jobs.”

— Rutger Bregman

47. “If we restructure education around our new ideals, the job market will happily tag along.”

— Rutger Bregman

48. “If a political party or a religious sect had even a fraction of the influence that the advertising industry has on us and our children, we’d be up in arms. But because it’s the market, we remain “neutral.”27.”

— Rutger Bregman

49. “Boredom may be the wellspring of creativity.”

— Rutger Bregman

50. “So in concrete terms, just how much dumber does poverty make you? “Our effects correspond to between 13 and 14 IQ points,” Shafir says. “That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep or the effects of alcoholism.” What’s.”

— Rutger Bregman