Jacob Weisberg Quotes

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

If you look not just at the Arab Spring, but at what I call the 'Youth Spring' that has started in Europe, young people are starting to find a voice, and they are not looking to the traditional media to reflect that.

The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.

Twitter provides a platform that allows anyone on the planet - from a political activist in the Middle East to an intemperate golfer in the White House - to broadcast his or her thoughts.

The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.

You can understand Tunisia revolution as a failure to censor the internet. And Libya had that failure too. It's very difficult for governments that are autocratic and don't have broad popular support to be in power when a lot of people have these devices. That was what Arab Spring was about, that people could express this and lead to revolution.

We need to also act out, and anything that [Donald] Trump does, anything he's trying to do that we don't agree with or anything this country is doing in general that we don't agree with, we need to protest, we need to make our voices heard. And that has to go beyond Twitter - for me as well.

From the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving it.

Al Qaeda's message that violence, terrorism and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and throughout the Arab lands.

It no longer counts as remarkable that Egyptians organized their uprising on social media.

Governments can no longer control 100 percent of the story. Time and geographical boundaries disappear. In places like China and all over the Middle East, social-media outlets are being used to expose and hold accountable public officials that don't want to be held accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.

Pages on Facebook are allowed to be anonymous. That is really important. People start revolutions; we need anonymity.

Al Jazeera is known in the Arab world as the voice of freedom of expression.

What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt.

The Arab Awakening or Arab Spring has transformed the geopolitical landscape.

Certainly we've seen the enormous changes across the whole of the Middle East. The democratic genie is out of the bottle.

As you know with the Arab Spring, there were no dividends.

The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring.

The Arabs have managed to turn democracy or their revolution into a dynastic or monarchic regime, which is handed down. Most Arab regimes are monarchic regimes, one way or another---especially the republics.

The Arab world is ripe for internal revolution like the USSR and China in the past decade.

Some in the West have long argued that because of the lack of a viable liberal alternative, supporting authoritarian regimes in Arab countries is the only political choice against the Islamists. Now, in Tunisia, as people flood into the streets demanding democracy, we see that this is not the case. It was not the case in Iran in 1979 either, but the West was so invested in the Shah that it failed to strongly back the liberal opposition. We don't have to repeat that error today.

If there had been Twitter at the time of the French Revolution, they would have claimed that the French Revolution was caused by twitter.

America has wearied of Middle East War.

In Arab countries where rebellion has succeeded in ousting leaders (or will), painful makeovers lie ahead. None will get through the change quickly. Most will stumble over daunting political and economic challenges. Some may fail. All will grapple to find the right blend of freedom and faith.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months