Richard Swenson, Margin

More quotes from Richard Swenson's great little book, Margin:

"No one in the history of humankind has ever had to live with the number and intensity of stressors we have acting upon us today.""For millenia upon millenia, change was slow, controlled, assessable; now it convulses at warp speed. 'Nothing defines our age more than the furious and relentless increase in the rate of change.'""In 1980, there were 12,000 items in the average supermarket; today there are 30,000--including the 186 different choices of breakfast cereal in our local grocery store...'As the number of choices grows further, the negative escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.'""A single edition of the New York Times contains more information than a seventeenth-century Britisher would encounter in a lifetime.""Everything I own owns me.""...our modern view of time is to compress it and milk it for every nanosecond of productivity we can get.""The best thing to remember about time-saving technologies is that they don't. Instead, they consume, compress, devour time. All the countries with the most time-saving technologies are the most stressed-out countries--an assertion that's easy to prove.""A man from Mali, West Africa told me 'You Americans have all the watches, but we have all the time.'"