Timothy Garton Ash Quotes

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

We live in an age that is driven by information. Technological breakthroughs... are changing the face of war and how we prepare for war.

I think sometimes we underestimate just how vulnerable Israel is on the public-relations front. That's why they spend so much money on propaganda. And that's why they panic every time they feel like they're losing the propaganda war.

We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

I think the media has changed, not just in England but in the world.

The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

Printing made us all readers. Xeroxing made us all publishers. Television made us all viewers. Digitization makes us all broadcasters.

There were no bubbles before there were media.

Like the invention of the printing press before it, the Internet has been the greatest instrumentality of free speech and the exchange of ideas in the history of mankind.

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.

The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture, the sociological aspects of our climbing culture, our 'me' generation, our yuppie culture, our SUVs, or, you know, shopping culture, our war culture.

Before, revolutions used to have ideological names. They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic. Now, the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used. You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions. The content doesn't matter anymore - the problem is the media.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

Technology and social media have brought power back to the people.

Now is the era of intellect, information and the Internet.

I believe that this is a different war than America has ever fought in the past. It is a non-conventional war. It means that you've got to use every tool you've got available to you.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.

This is all about a media war that continues to rage between the old and new media. Unfortunately for our soldiers, these brave Americans are caught in the crossfire.

The key battleground in the war on terrorism, therefore, is in the minds of the American public.

It's the first war we've ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.