Top 50 Rutger Bregman Quotes

Government isn’t there just to administer life support to failing markets. Without the government, many of those markets would not even exist.

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.

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.

Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender’ equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it’s not enough to live our own private lives.

One of my rules for life is: ‘When in doubt, assume the best,’ because in the end, most people are pretty decent.

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.

Believing in the good of humanity is a revolutionary act – it means that we don’t need all those managers and CEO’s, kings and generals. That we can trust people to govern themselves and make their own decisions.

The world view of the underdog socialist is encapsulated in the notion that the establishment has mastered the game of reason, judgment and statistics, leaving the left with emotion. Its heart is in the right place.

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.

But I think ‘Love, Actually’ has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant’s character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it’s about who we really are as a species.

I’ve been thinking that school, or certainly the traditional English public school model, is like a prison, in that you can’t get out and it is hierarchical. As a result they have a lot of bullying. On the other hand if you mix ages and academic ability this is less of a problem.

Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.

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.

New ideas rarely come from the moderate parties in The Hague or Washington, in Brussels or Westminster. The world’s political centres are not the breeding ground for true change, but rather where it comes home to roost.

The first thing we should acknowledge is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time it’s around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.

A universal basic income means not only that millions of people would receive unconditional cash payments, but also that millions of people would have to cough up thousands more in taxes to fund it. This will make basic income politically a harder sell.

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.

Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days.

As a species of animal that evolved to make connections and work together, it feels strange to suppress our desire for contact. People enjoy touching each other, and find joy in seeing each other in person – but now we have to keep our physical distance.

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.

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.

We’ll all remember 2020 as an historic year. And for decades, people will be able to say, remember 2020. Remember when things were really tough. Who did we rely on? I think that could impact a whole generation.

Literally every single sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone – internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition – was developed by researchers on the government payroll.

We so often tend to think our democracies are ruled by procedures and laws, but they are also governed by implicit rules and assumptions and one of them is the ability to feel shame – that you can be shamed.

A Dutchman can’t easily get away from cheese. I was dropped into a cauldron of cheese when I was young.

Psychologists even have a term for this: they talk about ‘mean world syndrome’. People who have just seen too much of the news have become more cynical, more pessimistic, more anxious, even more depressive. So, yeah, I think that is something you need to be wary of.

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.

We know from scientific studies that infants as young as six months old can distinguish right from wrong and have a preference for the good over the bad. I think it’s important to design our education and our schools around that insight, to bring out the best in our kids.

Since long workdays lead to more errors, shorter workdays could reduce accidents. Overtime is deadly. Tired surgeons have been found to be more prone to slip’ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.

Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education.

What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.

So I think that good journalism helps you to zoom out, to focus on the structural forces that govern our lives. And I think that good journalism is also not only about the problems, but also about the solutions, and the people who are working on these solutions.

History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.

One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.

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.

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.

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.

Since 1963, the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.

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.

There’s always selfish behavior. There are lots of examples of people hoarding. But we’ve seen in this pandemic that the vast majority of behavior from normal citizens is actually pro-social in nature. People are willing to help their neighbors.

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.

My life philosophy is that you need a boring private life if you want to have a more exciting public life.

If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.

If I say most people are pretty decent that may sound nice and warm but actually it’s really radical and subversive and that’s why, all throughout history, those who have advocated a more hopeful view of human nature – often the anarchists – have been persecuted.

During the Enlightenment, there were brilliant thinkers who realized that, if you assume most people are naturally selfish and you construct the market around that, sometimes it can actually work for the common good. I just think that in many cases, it went too far.

We like to think that people have to work for their money.

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.

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.