Jonathan Franzen Quotes

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

A full-fledged nanotechnology will disrupt all kinds of social and economic processes. Yet there is no reason to believe that humanity will be unable to cope with what is coming.

The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it.

Nowadays you can no longer let yourself be indoctrinated - the world is changing so fast! Even what you wanted twenty years ago is no longer relevant today; it's outdated.

One can describe the world of today to the people of today only if one describes it as capable of alteration.

I'm lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I'm grateful to be a witness to that. It's horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense?

There is every indication that the period ahead will be an innovative one, one of rapid change in technology , society , economy , and institutions .

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.

We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

Everything today is "transient." Technology and its ability to empower actors large and small evolve so quickly that we have to get used to living in a world that exists in a more or less constant state of flux.

I think the world is changing. And it's changing so fast that people have to change with it.

Marriage should, I think, always be a little bit hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.

Everyone knows that not all change is good or even necessary. But in a world that is constantly changing, it is to our advantage to learn how to adapt and enjoy something better.

Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most.

Know yourself and fit yourself to new fashions. For there is a new ruler among the gods.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

What is certainly true is that the American people, just like the German people, just like the British and people around the world, are seeing extraordinarily rapid change. The world is shrinking, the economies have become much more integrated and demographics are shifting.

Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control.

If the theatre has taught me anything, it's that when things change in the body, in the body politic, in the body of the world, in the body of the earth, in the body of the person, there's change. You never go back.

We're a new world and it's not pretty. It's going to be for the brave to figure out how to survive in this.

For students to understand what the future of journalism is going to be, they're going to have to invent it. It's a big idea. We don't know what journalism is going to look like in the next three years, let alone the next 10 years.

I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.

If you empower women, you can change the world.

We can only begin to change the world around us when we are willing to become a conscious part of all that is changing.