Al Gore > Quotes

“Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real.”
― Al Gore

“The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.”
― Al Gore

“In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original.”
― Al Gore

“Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.”
― Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

“As many know, the Chinese expression for "crisis" consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for "danger," the second the symbol for "opportunity."
”
― Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

“you can't be value free when it comes to marriage”
― Al Gore

“We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.”
― Al Gore

“تشبه العلاقة بين الإيمان والعقل والخوف أحيانا لعبة الأطفال التي تسمى الحجر والورقة والمقص، فالخوف يزيح العقل، والعقل يتحدى الإيمان، والإيمان يغلب الخوف.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.”
― Al Gore

“I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.”
― Dan Quayle

“We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.”
― Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit

“Air travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.”
― Al Gore

“No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”
― Al Gore

“Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that. I draw energy from discussing ideas.”
― Al Gore

“The 'well-informed citizenry is in danger of becoming the 'well-amused audience'.”
― Al Gore

“بمجرد أن أمكن نقل الأفكار المعقدة بسهولة من فرد إلى جموع الآخرين - وما أن تمكّن الآخرون من تلقيها بسهولة، وأصبح بوسعهم الموافقة عليها - صار لكل فرد فجأة قوة السلطة السياسية الشاملة.
لذلك أعطى تدفق المعلومات الحر كل فرد منزلة أكبر في المجتمع - بغض النظر عن انتمائه الطبقي أو ثروته - ليطالب بقدر من الكرامة يتساوى مع الآخرين جميعا، وتمنح الأفراد القدرة على فحص استخدام السلطة من قبل من يعملون في الحكومة.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“The rule of reason is the true sovereign in the American system.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“في السنوات الأولى من القرن الحادي والعشرين كان هنالك دوماً زعماء يرغبون في إثارة قلق الناس ,بغية تقديم أنفسهم بوصفهم حماة الخائفين. فالزعماء الغوغائيين يَعِدون دوماً بالأمن مقابل التنازل عن الحرية.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“I actually thought and believed that the story would be compelling enough to cause a real sea change in the way Congress reacted to that issue. I thought they would be startled, too. And they weren't.”
― Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming: Teen Edition

“الخوف أقوى أعداء العقل، والخوف والعقل جوهريان لحياة الإنسان، لكن العلاقة بينهما غير متوازنة. فقد يبدد العقل الخوف أحيانا، لكن الخوف يغلق العقل دوما.
وكما كتب إدموند بيرك في إنكلترا قبل عشرين عاما من الثورة الأمريكية: "ليس هناك شعور يسلب العقل كل قوى التصرف والتفكير بصورة مؤثرة مثل الخوف" .”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“إن حكام الغوغائية الجدد لا يوفرون أمناً أكثر من الأخطار ,لكن آراءهم وعباراتهم الساذجة ألاذعة المتكررة يمكن أن توفر الارتياح لمجتمع خائف”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“عندما اكتسب البشر تدريجياً مستوى أعلى من التفكير ,فإننا اكتسبنا ميزة القدرة على توقع التهديدات الناشئة ,واكتسبنا القدرة على تصور التهديدات بدلاً من إدراكها فقط .لكننا أيضاً اكتسبنا القدرة على تصور التهديدات (المتخيلة). وعندما تقتنع مجموعة من الناس بتصور هذه التهديدات (المتخيلة ),يمكنهم تنشيط استجابة الخوف لتصير بقوة الاستجابة نفسها للتهديدات الحقيقة .”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“عندما يكون ما تقوم به الحكومة متاحا بالكامل لفحص مواطنيها وخاضعا للمناقشة والجدال الفعال، يصبح من الصعب إخفاء الاستخدام الفاسد للسلطة العامة من أجل مكاسب شخصية، وإذا كان حكم العقل هو المعيار الذي يقوّم به كل استخدام للسلطة الرسمية، يمكن عندئذ لجماعة المواطنين الواعية الكشف عن أشد خطط خرق الثقة العامة تعقيدا وضبطها، إضافة إلى ذلك فإنه عندما تصعد الأفكار أو تهبط حسب جدارتها، يميل العقل إلى دفعنا في اتجاه قرارات تعكس أفضل المتاح من حكمة الجماعة كلها.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“I took the initiative in creating the Internet”
― Al Gore

“The flight insurance example highlights another psychological phenomenon that is important to understanding how fear influences our thinking: “probability neglect.” Social scientists have found that when confronted with either an enormous threat or a huge reward, people tend to focus on the magnitude of the consequence and ignore the probability. Consider how the Bush administration has used some of the techniques identified by Professor Glassner. Repeating the same threat over and over again, misdirecting attention (from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein), and using vivid imagery (a “mushroom cloud over an American city”). September 11 had a profound impact on all of us. But after initially responding in an entirely appropriate way, the administration began to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism to create a political case for attacking Iraq. Despite the absence of proof, Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with al-Qaeda and to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam was conflated with bringing war to the terrorists, even though it really meant diverting attention and resources from those who actually attacked us.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“Leadership means inspiring us to manage through our fears. Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

“Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.” He also said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” But we are right now in a period of great vulnerability. As noted earlier, when television became the primary source of information in the United States, the “marketplace of ideas” changed radically. Most communication was in only one direction, with a sharp decline in participatory democracy. During this period of vulnerability for American democracy—while traditional television is still the dominant source of information and before the Internet is sufficiently developed and secured as an independent, neutral medium—there are other steps that can and should be taken to foster more connectivity in our self-government.”
― Al Gore, The Assault on Reason