Rainn Wilson Quotes

The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

Industrialization, by drawing people from the countryside to the cities brings with it the weakening of traditional political and social support systems.

When I was young, there were bars called the 'Hungry Hole,' and in those same neighbourhoods are now gay people pushing baby carriages.

Gentrification always makes me laugh. People complain about traffic. Live in Atlanta! You can't have it both ways; you can't live in an incredible city and not expect it to get congested.

I like to think about society as being a flock of birds: There seems to be a common consciousness in different time periods, and the new common consciousness reacts to the old standards.

One thing, change, is what everyone says. The question is, what type of change? What's the right change to produce a different outcome for the people left behind by globalization?

I'm one of the people who believes that our losses were greater than our gains. Because before the Civil Rights movement we had entrepreneurship in the black community. Right now, in Harlem, if I wanted to get a shoe repaired, I would have a hard time finding a black shoe repairman. On near about every third corner, you could find a decent black barber, decent black laundry, had restaurants in the neighborhood that were open 24 hours. The food was good at 3 o'clock in the morning as at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

Pittsburgh has this rich industrial past, when it was the heart of the U.S. steel industry, and it burned out as the industry burned out and moved elsewhere.

Even with all of its changing, Brooklyn's architecture still feels like home, the language feels like home. It's changing so quickly that it's surprising. It's surprising still, when someone looks kind of askance to see me walking towards them.

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

I love New York. New York made me the man that I am, and I always rep it to the fullest, but right now it's completely different from what it was and anybody that says it's for the better is straight up lyin'. Straight up lyin'!

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution. (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a politician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that lets someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access to the global market.)

The common fisheries policy unfortunately led to the devastation of fishing in Scotland. My dad had to close his business. As a result something that he been built up by by grandfather and maintained by my dad disappeared. So my dad suffered.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.

The bottom feeders of the entertainment industry were never invited to presidential inaugurations. The bottom feeders of the entertainment were never used as fundraisers for presidents of the United States. They were ignored. There was always a line. They were always there, and they were always who they were, and they always did what they did. The bottom feeders have now become the standard. That's what's different.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

I don't know why anybody would come to Ireland chasing a dream or even employment - that's an extraordinary thing for a place where traditionally one was unemployed. For 10 years, people were coming from all over the world looking for employment here, kind of an extraordinary phenomenon. That's stopped now.

South Korea at the end of the Second World War had a very low level of literacy. But suddenly, like in Japan, they determined they were going in that direction. In 20 years' time, they had transformed themselves. So when people go on saying that it's all because of perennial culture, which you cannot change, that's not the way the South Korean economy was viewed before the war ended. But again within 30 years, people went on saying there's an ancient culture in Korea that has been pro-education, which is true.

Carbon negative power plants can provide energy while they overcome poverty and change economic values in the right direction.

Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.

The economy in the next 20 to 25 years is going to change more than they did in the last 20, 25 years. And that's because exponential trends are affecting a bigger and bigger share of the economy. So we have some huge disruptions in store, and I can't predict exactly what the innovations are going to be. If I did, I would have already invented them. But I think they'll be comparable to the innovations we saw in the past 20, 25 years if not greater.