Klaus Schwab Quotes

The Fourth Industrial Revolution can compromise humanity's traditional sources of meaning - work, community, family, and identity - or it can lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours.

While the digital transformation of industries will be profound, we must keep in mind that it will have wider economic and social impact, too, as with previous revolutions driven by steam and coal, electricity and computers.

The globe is shrinking, the information age is bringing a lot of changes. People are anxious about their future and their children's futures.

The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.

The most important impact on society and the world is the cell phone. Cell phones have actually been one of the primary drivers in productivity improvements.

I just think we're living in a time of massive, amazing change, like the Industrial Revolution on acid.

Because of new technologies, new wealth, new conditions of domestic life and of international relations, unprecedented criteria and issues are coming up for national decision.

Despite all the political sound and fury, little service-sector offshoring has happened to date. But it may eventually amount to a third Industrial Revolution, and industrial revolutions have a way of transforming societies.

… post-industrial society

I think technology can change every country regardless of political party.

To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.

Mankind had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and now this third one, the information revolution.

In this post-industrial society, when we're moving away from what was the norm, we have to deal with what it has left in its wake in terms of the impact on people and the environment.

The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

Technology's become the great prism for what's going on in the world.

When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

The lessons we have begun to learn make me hopeful, that human beings will become friendlier, more harmonious, less harmful. Compassion and the seeds of peace will be able to flourish. At the same time, every individual is responsible to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes alone are not enough; we have to take responsibility. Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives

Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.

It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.

National boundaries these days are not that important because of transformative technological development. Now we are talking about the fourth industrial revolution.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

My wish list is pretty short. I wish that we had empathy. As a society, we are so wrapped up in our own artificial creations that we have become disconnected from one another and the wonder of our natural world. I truly believe that empathy is the key to solving the majority of our environmental and social problems.

Mankind has always drawn from outside sources of energy. This island was the first to harness coal and steam. But our present sources stand in the ratio of a million to one, compared with any previous sources. The release of atomic energy will change the whole structure of society.