Tipping Point Quotes

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.

We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.

Every day is an opportunity for a new life. Every day you stand at the tipping point of your life. And on any one day you can change the future – through the way that you feel.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

Doing the little things can make a big difference.

I remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it.

I think we could be at a tipping point

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back.

When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there's what's called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight.

I wore one on the first episode of season one [of Fuller House], and then I saw it, and I went back to my hairstylist, and I was like, "We are never using this again!" I know it was a good throwback for that first season, but I am 40, I cannot pull off a scrunchie anymore. Nobody should be wearing a scrunchie anymore. I feel angry. That is my tipping point.

The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point. There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren’t paying attention.

If you can reach just 10 percent of the population, you can begin to reach a tipping point; that's where true social movements take place - it's a numbers game. And when you reach that number, the truth becomes obvious and empires of injustice crumble and fall.

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

I'm building on purpose. I'm building that tipping point. I'm building that law of diffusion of innovation.

We are facing a tipping point of environmental crisis unprecedented in human history and our very survival is dependent on protecting nature.

We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them.

Many say our world is at a tipping point. If we do not act together, if we do not act responsibly, if we do not act now, we risk slipping into a cycle of poverty, degradation, and despair.

We're just at a point in regard to race relations, we're at a tipping point in America. It's a crucial time. It's sad, honestly, I think it's a place that deep down no one wants to be in. But it's something that needs to be addressed, it's something that needs to be fixed, and hopefully we can figure it out and take steps toward doing that.

I do genuinely believe that the political system is not linear. When it reaches a tipping point fashioned by a critical mass of opinion, the slow pace of change we're used to will no longer be the norm. I see a lot of signs every day that we're moving closer and closer to that tipping point.

Right now over 70 percent of the world population is convinced that something serious has to be done about the dangers facing the planet. ...Most of humanity wants to know how to make the change. It's one of those tipping-point times where things can change unbelievably fast.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

I am not alone in thinking that we are at a tipping point ecologically and morally and politically. Democracy cannot survive without a vibrant middle class, yet the policies of one of the parties has been committed to wiping it out for 30 years.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

I think Ugg went out of being something that Kate Moss and Sienna Miller were wearing in high fashion circles and then they were embraced by everyone. Once something reaches that tipping point of mass popularity then suddenly the fashion world is a bit like, "Wah." As you say, you see them less kind of everywhere now so maybe it's time to bring them back.

The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. The General Strike attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.

Scientists are telling us that 350 parts per million [of carbon] in the atmosphere is the upper limit. We're at 387 parts per million now, and we're up in that zone where the risk of going past irrevocable tipping points is elevated. It's no different than going to a doctor and learning your cholesterol is too high, and you're at risk for a heart attack. You have to work to lower your cholesterol and hope to get there before the heart attack comes.

We have to, in the next ten years, begin to decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions and then flatten it out. If that doesn't happen in ten years, we're going to be passing certain tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can't tie a rope around an ice sheet.

The pace of global warming is accelerating and the scale of the impact is devastating. The time for action is limited - we are approaching a tipping point beyond which the opportunity to reverse the damage of CO2 emissions will disappear.

The world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the world that crosses carbon cycle tipping points that quickly take us to 1000 ppm, is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs. It is a world of a hundred Katrinas, of countless environmental refugees

We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.

My wildest tipping point moment came when I was introduced to Clint Eastwood. He was sitting there, typical Clint Eastwood, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, holding a Budweiser. He looks at me and says, "I watch your show from time to time." I just stopped. I was like, "I can't even think about that. I'm not even sure if I'm happy about that."

The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating.

The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances.

When you are incubating new ideas, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is very good advice. But when you are seeking to transform your enterprise's portfolio by scaling a fledgling business to material size - say ten percent of total enterprise revenue - then it is imperative that you make that the singular focus of everyone in the enterprise for the two to three year period it is likely to require to reach its tipping point. Expecting to do two such scaling efforts in parallel is simply folly, yet that is what the "eggs/basket" idea is often used to justify.

There's a tipping point that happens with soccer in which you just kinda get it. I was drawn to it because the best soccer teams play similarly to my favorite basketball teams - like the eighties Lakers or eighties Celtics - teams that emphasized teamwork over individualism and relied on passing as their biggest ongoing edge.

There’s no tipping point where you become what you are. Character development starts when you’re growing up. Your socioeconomic background contributes. The attitude that gets you through some communities doesn’t work in corporate America. It’s not an excuse, but it does help explain

A tipping point is invisible, as we just saw in Greece. In most situations, everything appears fine until it's not fine, until, for example, no one shows up at a Treasury auction.

I became very interested [in philosophy] after attending the U.N. Conference on sustainable development in Brazil.I'm very concerned about climate change and the world reaching a tipping point. And, I see other people who really just want to survive to make it to the next election, rather than making means of change.

We're putting 70 million tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere every day, trapping an enormous amount of extra heat from the sun inside the earth's atmosphere. It's threatening to push the planet past a tipping point beyond which climate change would be difficult to stop

Some experts look at global warming, increased world temperature, as the critical tipping point that is causing a crash in coral reef health around the world. And there's no question that it is a factor, but it's preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.

As people's access to the internet grows we're seeing the sharing economy boom - I think our obsession with ownership is at a tipping point and the sharing economy is part of the antidote for that.

The middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another generation if we don't boldly change course now.

It's a chicken-and-egg thing. You could send cards to everyone in San Francisco, but if the merchants don't have the terminals, what's the point? What you need is a cooperative effort with merchants in a metropolitan area to create a tipping point where you can justify advertising and merchants are willing to attempt this new payment system.

It's part of the reason I decided to speak out now. This was the tipping point for me. If it's O.K. for [David Petraeus ] to campaign for a job in the administration, then I'm going to campaign to get back out there, too.

I stand on the shoulders of giants that have gone before me, in terms of affording people like myself, women, the access to democracy, the vote, medical treatment, education, everything that I've been given. It's all been earned. Therefore I feel it's incumbent on me personally to just contribute something, to add to a collective voice that needs to be here right now, to build it up to a tipping point, to make the world aware that women's rights still have to be addressed and that the word 'feminism' has been devalued and needs to be reclaimed.

Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

Small mistakes, the lack of care, little accidents, and somewhere a tipping point is passed and things go badly wrong. Expedition history brims with tragedies built out of incremental missteps.

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.