Globalisation Quotes

“[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
Yes? Why is that?"
Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

“[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“One World is not abolishing frontiers, which would lead to a surge in migration, create tension and destabilise life on our planet. One World is rather abolishing the concept of borders in people's minds and replacing devotion to individual nations with belief in one united world, home to one race:
the human race.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Dans notre longue histoire, la guerre et la diplomatie se sont révélées insuffisantes pour créer la paix sur notre planète. Il est maintenant temps de rechercher des alternatives et il ne fait aucun doute qu'une langue mondiale et une culture commune peuvent jouer un rôle essentiel dans la construction d'un monde pacifique qui peut nous réunir tous.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“From deep within, our spirits are calling for a new and greater global wholeness, global healing, and global opportunity -- the voice is ours, the time is now, and the resources are what we have.”
― Laura Teresa Marquez

“How fragile is a world so connected and tied together that a change in food fashion in one place can lead to starvation halfway through the world?”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Charming English ladies financed the Atlantic slave trade by buying shares and bonds in the London stock exchange, without ever setting foot in either Africa or the Caribbean. They then sweetened their four o'clock tea with snow-white sugar cubes produced in hellish plantations – about which they knew nothing.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“A culinary cosmopolitan perspective resides in a context of tremendous inequality, but it may simultaneously facilitate meaningful cultural exchange, and attempt to link food choices to global risks like climate change.”
― Josée Johnston, Foodies

“Only from our position of power can we afford to ignore where things really come from, because we know that all things drain, like syrup through a pipeline, from the edges of the world into the centre. What we want will appear, as if by magic, on the shelves of our supermarkets because were have the money to pay for it. We don’t have to know - other people grow it and process it, and buy it and sell it until all we see is the brand, a language we understand without effort. All those strange substances are fuzed together for our convenience, our health, our pleasure.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“There is no culture where everyone cooks in the same way.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“The inevitable result of any search for authenticity is that you always end up with something completely modern in intent, since the purpose of the performance lies in the present, not the past.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“Hump, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, moral pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of the darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down on travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Colllie Knox says 1/8 of the world's population speaks 'English', and that is the biggest language group. if true, damn shame__ say I. May the curse of Babel strike at all their tongues till they can only say 'baa baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“It affirmed that international law was not only law 'between States' but 'also the law of mankind'. Those who transgressed it would have no immunity, even if they were leaders, a reflection of the 'outraged conscience of the world'.”
― Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

“While imagination is a faculty of the individual, imaginaries - "shared, socially transmitted representational assemblages" of people, places, and events - are a collective resource, the sum total of available imagery and ideas circulating in media, advertising, literature, word of mouth, and the like.”
― Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging

“Belonging, after all, is a particular kind of relation, one that arises amidst subjective experiences of mutual connection.”
― Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging

“I define culinary tourism as the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other - participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one’s own.”
― Lucy M. Long, Culinary Tourism

“I find it fascinating that this bottle is so cosmopolitan, a true multicultural brew, but it is so quiet about it.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“Or could it be that there is something about globalisation itself that produces local culture, and promotes the constant formation of new forms of local identity, dress, cuisine, music, dance and language?”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“Globalisation creates a world where causes are remote form effects, and the connections between them are often hidden or obscure.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“The idea that foods and diets will “just mix” when they come into contact is clearly a vast oversimplification.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“But instead of being frozen in time, I want to show that “local” and “authentic” food are as much creations of modernity as survivors from before it. Authenticity is therefore a problem, not something we can ever depend on as some kind of naturally occurring category. Tradition is crafted, just as much as modernity is manufactured.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“The world becomes a pageant of diversity with its differences neatly organised and selected.”
― Richard R. Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists

“it isn’t just talent which is mobile today, the work itself is highly mobile too.”
― Gyan Nagpal, The Future Ready Organization: How Dynamic Capability Management Is Reshaping the Modern Workplace

“We are entering a world, where the only legitimate borders for work are skill boundaries”
― Gyan Nagpal, The Future Ready Organization: How Dynamic Capability Management Is Reshaping the Modern Workplace

“We all are nothing but Intellectual prostitutes”
― Subhankar Sengupta

“Far from setting the stage for more prosperity, the more these markets were opened, they predicted, the more unfavorable Africa's position was likely to become and the more damage would be done to African economies. For these critics, it was utopian footling to suggest that African farmers could soon match the rich world in financial resources, technology, or infrastructure, whether on the national level (roads, ports, bridges, ect.) or in the context of individual farms. Given these realities, a far likelier outcome was the further immiseration and marginalization of Africa's rural smallholders, while the most important enduring effect of trade liberalization was the creation of new markers for the agricultural producers of the Global North.”
― David Rieff, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century

“A main agent of that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which not only to realize existing desires but even to create new ones we did not know we had. The state becomes charged with extending the sphere of commerce, particularly with enlarging the range of trade, production, and mobility. The expansion of markets and the infrastructure necessary for that expansion do not result from 'spontaneous order'; rather, they require an extensive and growing state structure, which at times must extract submission from the system's recalcitrant or unwilling participants.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Globalisation and localisation are not antithetical but rather correlated processes: evolution of the concept of territoriality and the risk of levelling and sameness (of values, culture and so forth) make it necessary to reconsider and valorise local belonging and diversity.”
― Giuseppe De Vergottini, Topographical Names and Protection of Linguistic Minorities