Society

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.

Labor Rights Activist & Farm Workers Union Organizer

What analysts mean by 'game changing' is, in fact, the level of naturalisation of technology. This is the degree to which a technology becomes an intuitive part of human life.

One basis for society is that of helping your neighbour — but in the software world this is piracy. To prevent this, the U.S. is putting in place practices which are like those in the former Soviet Union — computerized guards, propaganda in favour of licensing, rewards for informing on co-workers, and penalties which make distributing software as serious a crime

Founder of Free Software Movement & Creator of GNU Project

All participants in a society have a responsibility to it's social contract.

The group found that, on average, people living in Manhattan travel 2.5 miles most days, compared to five miles in Los Angeles. But we also found that when you look at the longest trips people make, people that live in New York go significantly further, 69 miles on a weekday compared to 29 in Los Angeles.

Unknown.

Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

Pakistan has sought to reassure international donors that funds to help victims of its devastating flooding will not fall into extremists' hands. The Taliban would not be allowed to take advantage of the crisis to increase its support.

Former Interior Minister of Pakistan & Security Advisor

Economies are built on free flow of capital within the market, which drives trade. Business and individuals need debt (finance) to invest, develop, trade and grow. This is a fundamental truth of how markets operate.

Those who are suffering the consequences of these price increases are rarely (if at all) responsible for their creation- leading to an exacerbated (and right) sense of injustice.

How would one expect society to develop 'actualisation' and 'esteem' driving characteristics (economic growth and spending) when the basic 'physiological' and 'safety' needs (food security, employment, health, property) are not met.

When the main participants in an economy (the general population not the investment banks) are struggling to survive- no amount of economic stimulus applied at arms-length from those participants- will inject growth.

While it may seem an altogether preposterous notion that people should have to pay for air, a very basic component of life- one must read this hypothetical tale in context of the fact that over 1.7billion people cannot afford food (also a very basic component of life)- and a similar amount have little access to clean drinking water (another very basic component of life).

The impact to one's own sense of happiness and prosperity of not being able to afford 'basic' goods is far greater than not being able to afford 'discretionary' goods. By increasing the financial stress on consumers abilities to purchase essentials- the rest of the economy suffers, as people are more likely to hoard than spend.

The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.

Renowned Linguist & Political Activist, Critic of US Foreign Policy

Even though we still have approximately twenty thousand hydrogen bombs in the arsenals of the United States and Russia (many of them ready to use at a moment's notice) the two risks that most experts think are the greatest and most likely are the risks of a single bomb being used by a terrorist group or the risk of a regional war involving dozens of weapons.

Nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund.

income inequality, as a measure of relative depravation, was consistently associated with violent crimes.