Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.

very often we think about political change in defined compartments these days. Environment in one box, inequality in another, racial and gender justice in a couple of other boxes, education over here, health over there. And within each compartment, there are thousands upon thousands of different groups and NGOs, each competing with one another for credit, name recognition and of course, resources. In other words, we act a lot like corporate brands. Now, this is often referred to as the problem of silos. Now, silos are understandable. They carve up our complex world into manageable chunks. They help us feel less overwhelmed. But in the process, they also train our brains to tune out when somebody else's issue comes up and when somebody else's issue needs our help and support. And they also keep us from seeing glaring connections between our issues.

To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

Independence did not mean chauvinism and narrow nationalism.

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.

We can't return to the 19th century, draw up our drawbridges and say, we don't have anything to do with each other, Germany will not work with the Netherlands, the UK will not work with France. That's ludicrous. We are condemned to work with each other.

I have long believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in.

The nation-state has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems.

One of the challenges I think we have is people feel like the act of governance is a zero sum game. 'Whatever I get, you're not getting.' Changing that dynamic is going to be critically important for me as a leader, so that people don't feel they're pitted against each other.

And if we're all one, we need to stop our competition with each other. Most of the decisions we make are about survival and winning.

Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it's now impossible if you want to actually get anything done. All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.

You can't have cutthroat competition when there's no one stopping you from actually cutting each other's throats. In order to build up trust we also have to think about each other's needs and it creates an entirely different dynamic.

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality.

We need each other to do things that we can't do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don't know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand.

Our world and our lives have become increasingly interdependent, so when our neighbour is harmed, it affects us too. Therefore we have to abandon outdated notions of 'them' and 'us' and think of our world much more in terms of a great 'US', a greater human family.

You are in a partnership with all other human beings, not a contest to be judged better than some and worse than others.

The thing we need most is each other.

People may be said to resemble the pieces of a puzzle, each unique, yet each essential to bring out a complete picture.

I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

I believe that without looking at each other as rivals or as competitors, in a democratic India, operating in the framework of an open economy, an open society has, I think, some significance for developing countries, not only in Asia but outside Asia.

It always takes two. For relationships to work, for them to break apart, for them to be fixed.

Acting is a bit like tennis in that you can't really do it on your own.

There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. Andit's lonely.

In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.