Dee Hock Quotes

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China's society is opening.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

I think we live in a period of profound transformation. Very similar to when we had a transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

Cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

We live in a scientific revolution. In such an epoch of revolutionary change, those who identity laissez-faire with liberty are enemies, however unwitting, of democracy

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

'Aquarian Conspiracy' is the term I have coined for the network of people working for social transformation based on personal inner change. Such a notion is not at all alien to the American milieu.

Audiences change because life changes. Countries change geographically, climatically, socially and morally. Many things happen, and cinema, in a sense, reflects what's happening in the world.

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

Indian cinema is changing not because of outside pressure but because of inside pressure. Society is changing. Obviously, ideas change because of globalization, because of the huge middle class that is mostly first generation.

Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.

Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift.

How is it possible that in just the last ten years all of these things which were taboo throughout our culture, throughout the culture, things that were taboo are now not only normal but celebrated, and people who were not really supportive of them are called kooks and the new weirdos?

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

It's possible to go faster than folk are ready for; that's the key to democracy.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

The years after 2000 will be a monumental change in the way life is lived here. It will be harder and harder to relate to our children. I don't know what it's going to be. I don't plan to be around in the year 2000. I'll be taken away by the Sufi God.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.