Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.
If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.
It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.
I think it's rational to assume the best in other people because most people are pretty decent.
A Dutchman can't easily get away from cheese. I was dropped into a cauldron of cheese when I was young.
History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.
My life philosophy is that you need a boring private life if you want to have a more exciting public life.
People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it's not enough to live our own private lives.
No one is suggesting societies the world over should implement an expensive basic income system in one stroke.
Almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share.
One of my rules for life is: 'When in doubt, assume the best,' because in the end, most people are pretty decent.
What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.
The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need.
My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.
Basic income would give people the most important freedom: the freedom of deciding for themselves what they want to do with their lives.
Instead of a universal basic income, we could have a basic income guarantee. Or, as economists prefer to call it, a negative income tax.
Children are born as emphatic and compassionate beings - so you don't have to teach them generosity, it's in their nature to be friendly.
I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous.
The real 'Lord of the Flies' is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.
Government isn't there just to administer life support to failing markets. Without the government, many of those markets would not even exist.
My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we're in this together.
Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender' equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work.
Poor people aren't making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
The most daunting challenges of our times, from climate change to the ageing population, demand an entrepreneurial state unafraid to take a gamble.
Even if you don't care about the environment whatsoever, solar panels are really cool, and are an investment because they save money in the long run.
Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.
It matters so much that from a very early age we encounter different kinds of different people, because that's what real life should be about as well.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model.
Our streets are very important for social cohesion, for feelings of safety, and we just surrendered all this to the car. But it doesn't have to be that way.
It's important to make a distinction between the news and journalism. The news is about recent, incidental and sensational events. It's mostly about exceptions.
A worldwide shift to a shorter working week could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint.
I first read 'Lord of the Flies' as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding's view of human nature.
I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.
I've solved my phone addiction by deleting all the apps I was addicted to - email, browser - and getting my wife to add parental controls, to limit access even further.
A lot of great things are going on. In many ways, the past 30 years have been the best in world history. But we can do much better. I prefer the word hope over optimism.
A universal basic income would be the best way to give everyone the opportunity to do more unpaid but incredibly important work, such as caring for children and the elderly.
In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity.
Nowadays excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.
Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.
I always eat bread and almost always peanut butter and apple syrup, sometimes cheese. I hardly ever ate out as a child. When I did it more as a student, it felt strange to be served.
Contact is the best medicine against hate, racism and prejudice. It's something that we should be very wary of, the more segregation we have, the more of a problem that's going to be.
This is what a crisis does: It makes you question the status quo. That doesn't mean that after a crisis we move into some kind of utopia. But it is an opportunity for political change.
When I talk about 'everyday communism', I am teasing a little. It is a provocative idea. But then we all do a lot of sharing a lot of the time. We don't draw up contracts for everything.
News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.
As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.
I know that there are many excellent arguments for a universal form of basic income. Since everyone would get it, it would remove the stigma that dogs recipients of assistance and 'entitlements'.
Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.
In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.
I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it's not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.