By establishing a democratic constitutional order, a society is attempting to do something that can …
Elliot Bulmer — What is a Constitution? Principles and Practice
#quote
To produce knowledge, we must step back from ourselves because the more we want to know ourselves, t…
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — Judge & Punish - The penal State on trial
What matters here is the underlying pro-social view of human nature that inspired and informed the c…
Jimmy Wales — The Seven Rules of Trust - A Blueprint for Building Things That Last
So, whose crazy idea next?
Jimmy Wales — The Seven Rules of Trust - A Blueprint for Building Things That Last
All revolutionaries are naive: they trust man! What a mistake! Trusting man!
Aimé Césaire — Une saison au Congo
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. …
Aimé Césaire — Discours sur le colonialisme
Justice listens at the gates of beauty.
Aimé Césaire — Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82
If you want to understand my politics, read my poetry.
Aimé Césaire — Unknown Source
Voting is not a way of discovering what a group truly wants, but a way of bringing disagreement to a…
Ed Maklouf — The Majorithy Myth
What, in the end, transforms a flurry of individual signals into a single, binding group choice?
Ed Maklouf — The Majorithy Myth
Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social…
Karl Marx — Capital Volume I
A fundamental inability to reconcile the image of scientists as employees laboring on behalf of the …
Michael Aaron — Our Monsters, Ourselves
Only the enemy of scientific freedom is no longer an armed enemy nation state angling for our destru…
Michael Aaron — Our Monsters, Ourselves
It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change …
Raymond Williams — The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament
We need futures work that resists speed, resists spectacle, and resists the temptation to simplify w…
Romano Theunissen — 'The Futures Cone Reimagine: A Framework for Critical and PLural Futures Thinking' in the Journal of Futures Studies
Futures are not imagined as separate from the past, but as reactivations of storylines, remembered, …
Romano Theunissen — 'The Futures Cone Reimagine: A Framework for Critical and PLural Futures Thinking' in the Journal of Futures Studies
Atheists tend to think of themselves as immune against belief, which is the worst thing. We fall int…
Bernard Friot — Débat autour du livre 'Oser penser sa pensée' avec Janine Guespin et Bernard Friot
Disrupting this flatness, revealing the topographies of power, is one aim of work on sociotechnical …
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity
It \[sociotechnical imaginaries\] offers unfettered entry into the co-produced realities of the know…
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity
Truthfulness in the social sciences today, most would agree, demands simultaneous attention to more …
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity
Co-production offers such a framework. It is symmetrically concerned with mutual emergencies in how …
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity
The same collective imaginary may condition and constrain the sense of justice that binds a communit…
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity
Can imaginaries be transformative as vehicles for reenvisioning and recalibrating human features?
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity
the myridad ways in which scientific and technological visions enter into the assemblages of materia…
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the IMaginations of Modernity
Sociotechnical imaginaries […] as collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly perfor…
Sheila Jasanoff — Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the IMaginations of Modernity
We have to create futures in which everyone doesn't have to be the same kind of person
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 57)
If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 214)
We learn that tests and deadlines are the reason to take action.
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 48)
We are calling for a movement-wide shift away from acrion that isn't grounded in a vision of deep sy…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 64)
Move forward with awareness.
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 220)
At the human scale, in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have ro…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 158)
We aim to be an organizational model of the change we call for in the world.
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 64)
We are excited about what we can create, we believe it is possible to create the next world.
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 16)
We each have important pieces of the whole, so I concentrate my work on the generation of vision, th…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 57)
I reject the idea that there is ever only one way forward at an individual or collective level
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 239)
Being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, th…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 16)
We don't want to cling to outdated paradigms; we want to cling to each other and shift the paradigms…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 263)
In spite of their best intentions, those who aren't directly impacted only see the surface layer(s) …
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p; 63)
The actions that have had the most impact were uniquely suited to the time, place, and political con…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 64)
[Support] action when the community most impacted by a political, social, ecnomoic, or environmental…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 64)
'All organizing is science fiction', by which we mean that social justice, work is about creating sy…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 160)
If we want a world that works for more people, we have to get into the practice of ideating together
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy
How to we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans a…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 18)
What are the root problems in my community, and what do deep, foundational, rooted solutions look li…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 66)
It's just that we live in a system that thrives when conditions are abundant and diverse, in a unive…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 156)
The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the f…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 158)
Change is coming--what do we need to imagine as we prepare it?
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 59)
Develop a strategic direction moving towards vision, determining appropriate tactics based on the ho…
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 220)
I want a future in which we are curious, interested, visionary, adaptive
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 58)
Someday we might speak of presidents and CEOs in past tense only
Adrienne Maree Brown — Emergent Strategy (p. 18)
Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
Albert Camus — La Pléiade, Iv, 'Carnets Du 7 Novembre 1958
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence i…
Albert Camus
The great growling engine of change - technology
Alvin Toffler — Future Shock (Chap 2)
An effort to understand how rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level o…
Bates — 1988
We think a universe that our language has already shaped.
Benveniste — Problems in General Linguistics
What does a revolutionary class imply today? It means to assert that everyone above 18 and until the…
Bernard Friot — Histoire De La Sécu (Preface)
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model tha…
Buckminster Fuller
Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
C. Wright Mills
Reality may not be captured by a single objective book of the world, but only by a library of subjec…
Christian List — 'Consciousness reveals there's no single objective world', iai news
If it remains to be proven that a child electorate would be incompetent, beating the olympic records…
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
Children ask embarrassing questions, because they are essential, on war, on meat, on money, on love,…
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
We know nothing about what a country, a continent, a world where children vote could look like.
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
What are the biases that push me to treat my case as universal, or on the contrary, to minimise it?
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
Voting time does not require any particular skill, and *rightly so*.
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
The complexity of ballot types, the opacity of most measures, the impossibility of distinguishing be…
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
When abstract reflection develops, when a child starts to be able to read a map, to comprehend more …
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
One of the greatest preconceived ideas about childhood is that it has nothing to do with politics.
Clémentine Beauvais — Pour Le Droit De Vote Dès La Naissance
What will actually make it through is not a theory of change, but an ecology of theory of changes li…
Daniel Schmachtenberger — Search Of The Third Attractor (1H11mn)
Much more interested in exploring possibilities than likelihoods, because a great many more things m…
David Brin — The Self-Preventing Prophecy: Or How A Dose Of Nightmare Can Help Tomorrow's Perils (p. 222)
It's a difficult business, creating a new, alternative civilization.
David Graeber — The Democracy Project
Economists sometimes forget that economic activity does not just happen, but is shaped by political …
Derek Wall — Elinor's Rules For Radicals
I've learned that those of us with the same dreams can find each other, and in finding each other, w…
Desiree Evans — River Lesson
It's easier to learn about a system's element than about its interconnections.
Donella H. Meadows — Thinking In Systems: A Primer
The new resistance is primarily a resistance of the mind to the wave of lies, illusions, and collect…
Edgar Morin — Entretien Between Simon Blin And Edgar Morin, 4 July 2024
Anarchism is democracy taken seriously
Edward Abbey — Theory of Anarchy
Learning is an incremental, self-transforming process.
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
Information about benefits must be searched for, organized, and analyzed.
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
He realized that a group of people with common interests and needs could create their own systems an…
Elinor Ostrom — New 2012
Assuming independent action does not push the analyst to ask if individuals take into account the ef…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
Individuals are viewed as if they are in a trap and cannot get out without some external authority i…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
Data concerning benefits, costs, shared norms, and opportunities are summary variables that affect a…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit - and from the set of accepted, well-developed th…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons
It is my conviction that knowledge accrues by the continual process of moving back and forth from em…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons
There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well meaning, are bett…
Elinor Ostrom — 2009 Nobel Prize Announcement
The tendency to try to inform uniform rules throughout a jurisdiction, rather than specialised rules…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons' (Chap 6, Part 2)
The term 'common-pool ressource' refers to a natural or man-made resource system that is sufficientl…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 2)
Even when individuals have considerable capabilities to engage in self-governance, there is no guara…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons
The presence of appropriator organizations, sich as cooperatives or voluntary associations, usually …
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
Bureaucrats sometimes do not have the correct information, while citizens and users of resources do.
Elinor Ostrom — 2009 Nobel Prize Announcement
The individuals using CPRs are viewed as if they are capable of short-term maximization, but not of …
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
The appropriators in Alanya, Törbel, the Japanese mountain villages, Valencia, Ilocos Norte, the Cal…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (p. 185)
Assuming complete information about participant behavior does not push the analyst to examine how in…
Elinor Ostrom — Governing The Commons (Chap 6)
We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure a…
Elinor Ostrom — 2019 Nobel Prize Announcement
But could we ignore that, assuming that humans want to live, a very simple operation immediately tra…
Emile Durkheim — De la division du travail social (Livre I)
Since a decision always originates from a limited number of people against others, its legitimacy sh…
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — L'Ame Noire de la Démocratie
If sciences represent the practice through which man becomes aware of humanity, and if politics is h…
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — L'Ame Noire de la Démocratie
By having me believe that what I think is my own at a given time, democracy's effect might not so mu…
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — L'Ame Noire de la Démocratie
Show us how your political plan will result in the protection of vital forces and the weakening of f…
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — L'Ame Noire de la Démocratie
A progressive political programme should be centred on argumenting and separating rather than a requ…
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — L'Ame Noire de la Démocratie
In democracy, the other is constructed as a subject in my power.
Geoffrey de Lagasnerie — L'Ame Noire de la Démocratie
What is the next most elegant step?
Gibran Rivera
The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technological knowledge in this d…
Hannah Arendt — The Human Condition
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that n…
Hannah Arendt — Hannah Arendt: From an Interview, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 26, 1978
And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of…
Hannah Arendt — Hannah Arendt: From an Interview, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 26, 1978
(A) wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Herbert Simon
We know that to reach our shared goals we must grow and evolve the network.
Jodie Tonita — Emergent Strategy (p. 174)
We're committed to growing the capacity of these high-trust networks. We want to see them evolve and…
Jodie Tonita — Emergent Strategy (p. 176)
We are not leveraging knowledge and innovation from other sectors nearly enough. The structures of o…
Jodie Tonita — Emergent Strategy (p. 176)
I believe in all religions.
John Coltrane — Meditations
Rational elites know everything there is to know about their self-contained, technical or scientific…
John Ralston Saul — 1992 interview with Barry James, International Herald Tribune
The beginning of democracy requires a transport into a necessary fiction.
Judith Butler — To Imagine A World After This, Democracy Needs The Humanities, 20Th Feb 2025
Transformation, dissent, and revolution are impossible without collective imagining.
Judith Butler — To Imagine A World After This, Democracy Needs The Humanities, 20Th Feb 2025
Some gain power by saying that they are the law. There is no supervenient law to which one has recou…
Judith Butler — To Imagine A World After This, Democracy Needs The Humanities 20th Feb 2025
And democracy requires precisely this: a form of collective assembly in impossible time and space.
Judith Butler — To Imagine A World After This, Democracy Needs The Humanities, 20Th Feb 2025
Democracy makes sense only if all the people participate equally in the collective democratic right …
Judith Butler — To Imagine A World After This, Democracy Needs The Humanities, 20Th Feb 2025
What the bourgeoisie...produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels — The Communist Manifesto
Dreams of universal rationality may sponsor their own special forms of irrationality.
Keller Easterling — Extrastatecraft
We have an obligation to be optimistic, to try—in effect, to bring about the best possible futured.
Kim Stanley Robinson — Tomorrow's parties
If you do not trust the people, they will become untrustworthy.
Lao Tsu — Tao Te Ching
It is very very important to share the things that we do, that are meaningful and that work.
Lola Lafon — Entretien Avec Mediapart, Mars 2025
*Sorry if the fantastic seems appealing.* We're alive there.
Lola Olufemi — Experiments In Imagining Otherwise
Right now, how many of us can say we gave a plan that has factored in everybody?
Lola Olufemi — Experiments In Imagining Otherwise
The idea that groups tend to act in support of their group interests is supposed to follow logically…
Mancur Olson — The Logic Of Collective Action (Introduction)
As long as you are dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending …
Marie Oliver — A Thousand Mornings: Poems
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mut…
Martin Luther King Junior — Letter from a Birmingham Jail
It's very hard to work out when what we're doing actually has an impact in the current age
Mehdi Hasan — 'Existential threat' on Channel 4
How are the actions of workers and consumers connected?
Michael Albert — Parecon
In a desirable economy each worker and consumer should have equal access to information regarding th…
Michael Albert — Parecon
Computers that quickly and conveniently provide information on the implications for average consumpt…
Michael Albert — Parecon
Participatory planning-a system in which worker and consumer councils propose their work activities …
Michael Albert — Parecon
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagi…
Michel Foucault — The Subject and Power
There's nothing more exciting, than getting the wrong answer
Neil De Grasse Tyson — StarTalk
Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple i…
Nick Obolensky — Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox And Uncertainty
The world is full of needy people. They don't need all the same things, but they all need purpose. E…
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Talents
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Trickster
We haven't even begun to deal with it.
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Sower
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intell…
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Sower
Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware.
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Sower
To shape god with wisdom and forethought, to benefit your god and people, your life, consider conseq…
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Talents
Even so, what can't I do what other people have done-ignore the obvious.
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Sower
Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
Octavia Butler — The Parable Of The Sower
Everyone knows that change is inevitable
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Sower
All that you touch, You Change. All that you change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. …
Octavia Butler — Parable Of The Sower
The importance of assessing possibility rather than likelihood is that it puts our collective action…
Peter Frase — Four Futures
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing
Raymond Williams — Resources of Hope (p. 118)
Behaviour that determines the standard by which it is judged, behaviour that forces us to reevaluate…
Roger Holmes — Legitimacy and the Politics of the Knowable (p. 101)
Information is a public good to collectively finance and support if we want to ensure that the plura…
Salomé Saqué — Résister
While they keep rehashing the past, we invent the future.
Salomé Saqué — Résister
Prudence calls for 'technologies of humility' to take better account of uncertainties and unknowns i…
Sheila Jasanoff — Science and Public Reason
Who bears the risks and who gains the benefits was not always on the discussion table.
Sheila Jasanoff — Science and Public Reason
The commons is not about organizational form or property rights. It's about the *purpose*.
Silke Helfrich
Information is a beacon, a cuddle~, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how…
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner — Freakonomics (Chap 13)
Experts depend ln the fact you don't have the information they do, or that you were so befuddled~ by…
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner — Freakonomics (Chap 14)
Democracy should put aside the habit of taking itself for granted.
Thomas Mann
I chip and stutter but I do not sing the truth, like any bird.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The gallant books of lies are never quite enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Mind is Still
The emergence of the 'networked information economy offers a series of identifiable improvements in …
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 12)
Freedom of action for individuals coupled with continuous communications among the pool of potential…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 4)
The emergence of coordinate effects, where the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it i…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
With the right institutional framework and peer-review or quality-control mechanisms, and with well-…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 4)
Peer production and nonmarket production are producing desirable public information—news and comment…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 5)
The result is a proliferation of strands of stories and of means of scanning the universe of potenti…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 5)
The great success of [...] peer-production processes in particular, has been the adoption of technic…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 4)
We are a networked society now—networked individuals connected with eafh other in a mesh of loosely …
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 10)
The widely distributed model of information production will better identify the best person to produ…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 4)
We now have new scope for interaction with others.
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 10)
The networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: radically decebtra…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 3)
What constitutes the range of plausible political topics is locally contingent, changes over time, a…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap6)
Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in way…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
While it is possible to posit idealized avaricious money-grubbers, altruistic saints, or social clim…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 4)
To what extent will resources necessary for information production and exchange be governed as a com…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new platform for our n…
Yochai Benkler — The Weath Of Networks (Chap 8)
The emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more act…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
We are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us, and how …
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 12)
This necessity for cooperation requires peer-production processes to adopt more engaged strategies f…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Nations (Chap 4)
The basic requirement of a public sphere is that it is must in principle be susceptible to perceivin…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 6)
The sitting administration must act as a participant in explicit conversation, and not as a platform…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 6)
Filters, both of relevance and accreditation, provide a critical point of control over the debate, a…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 6)
What characteristics of a communications system and practices are sufficiently basic to be desired b…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 6)
The platform has to provide some capacity to synthesize the finely disparate and varied versions of …
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 6)
In the context of information, knowledge, and culture, because of the nonrivalry of information and…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 4)
We are in the midst of a technological, ecnomic, and organizational transformation that allows us to…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
Peer production can provide a new domain of reasonably thick connection with remote others.
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks, Ch12
The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer ne…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 7)
Individuals adopt projects andpurposes they consider worth pursuing.
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 10)
Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and socia…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
How they \[information, knowledge and culture\] are produced and exchanged in our society critically…
Yochai Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 1)
The networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production practices that these tool…
Yochain Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 7)
It starts with the question: What do I care about most now?
Yochain Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 7)
The output is more easily recognizable as a collective output and a salient opinion or observation t…
Yochain Benkler — The Wealth Of Networks (Chap 7)