Rutger Bregman Quotes

Broken institutions are an opportunity rather than a time to go home.

There is complete disdain for all that exists .... History, society, and the economics of present institutions are all minor issues in choosing a reform program ...

Beginning reform is beginning revolution.

There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them; and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion

This is not a Budget, but a revolution; a social and political revolution of the first magnitude.

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

Many years before I had left a beautiful country and a rich nation and I returned to that country six years later to find it fundamentally changed and in a state of upheaval, and in great spiritual and material need.

The spirit of the age is the very thing a great man changes.

You get few chances to make really transformational institutional change.

Government is on a collision course with the future

A revolution is generally only evolution--an explosive sequence of events crowded into a short space of time, but leaving more of the ancient regime untouched than usually is at first apparent.

If you want to really change something, do not try to fight the existing reality. create a new reality.

In order for a president to be transformational, the old order has to fall as the orthodoxies that kept it in power exhaust themselves.

Crisis creates leverage to change.

You don't do new things and try to change the system without generating debate.

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.

The crisis that we inherit when we come to power will be the occasion for fundamental change and not the excuse for postponing it

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

Nearly everyone is aware of dramatic changes in the world. Yet we continue to live in the assumption that we can ride out the changes without changing ourselves, coasting, as we have always coasted, on the historic wave of human development. What it will take to wake us up is a wave of equal size traveling in the opposite direction. That wave is already on its way.

There can come a time when change is so cataclysmic that it changes the fundamentals of how we do our politics.

Many new technologies come with a promise to change the world, but the world refuses to cooperate.

To innovate is not to reform.

Believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That's where I'm very optimistic.

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.