180 Quotes by Rutger Bregman

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.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

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

It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.

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.

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.

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.

Basic income would give people the most important freedom: the freedom of deciding for themselves what they want to do with their lives.

News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.