167 Quotes by Clay Shirky

A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors.

What you need for a participatory system to work: “a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain.”

Human beings are social creatures – not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

One of the best ways to know you’re completely wrong, is to behave as if you’re complete right.

The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can’t be knowledge no one knows.

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this – the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it’s expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

Upgrading one’s imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.