Lev Grossman Quotes

Web 2.0 is a grand utopian movement. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is "elitist" traditional media.

Digg is like your newspaper, but rather than a handful of editors determining what's on the front page, the masses do.

The Internet is changing what entertainment and sports is. It's not just a few people authoring an experience for others. It's really growing out of what everybody does.

I use a lot of the Web 2.0 apps that I've seen out there, and I think there is incredible work going on there.

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

I like the immediacy of blogs and the democratizing effects of letting millions of voices bloom on the Web.

The Web 2.0 world is defined by new ways of understanding ourselves, of creating value in our culture, of running companies, and of working together.

I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

I worked on a number of projects that were used by millions of people and that also served as inspiration to what we now call "crowd-sourcing."

Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world.

Throughout history, people with new ideas—who think differently and try to change things—have always been called troublemakers.

You can get really far by putting your ideas out there and letting other people build on them.

It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

When somebody comes up with a progressive idea, to begin with, you're mad, bonkers. Then if you go on, you're dangerous. Then there's a pause. Then you can't find anyone who can say they thought of it in the first place. That's how progress is made. This is why I do believe in the vote. In the end, all these people who've been tempted to the right realise the warning lights in their constituency are brighter than the bright lights from No. 10 offering them things.

Real change never occurs from the top on down, [but] always from the bottom on up.

Let the "socialist" snivellers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun.

I'm always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.

Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

Most innovation comes from people working together, collaborating in teams.

I think the most important thing is discovering an idea that moves you, and then letting people who are moved by that idea find each other, and work together. A lot of times people focus on the technical side-"oh, I've got to take a class on non-profit development." Too few people allow themselves to think outside the box with regard to their issue areas.

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted." But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.

If we were to promise people nothing better than only revolution, they would scratch their heads and say: 'Is it not better to have good goulash?'