Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin’s punch lands in the gap between “I’m sure” and “Nobody knows” - a neatly engineered whiplash that captures how technological optimism routinely outruns institutional certainty. He starts by granting the pro-GMO side its most comforting premise: plenty of products will likely be safe. Then he yanks the rug out with a second question that shifts the burden from the anecdotal to the systemic. “Many” is not the bar that matters in food; “most” is. Safety isn’t a vibe, it’s a statistical claim, and Rifkin’s line forces that distinction into the open.

The subtext is less anti-science than anti-premature closure. He’s interrogating the politics of reassurance: when regulators, corporations, and even scientists speak in the language of confidence, they often smuggle in a claim about scale and time they can’t actually defend. “Nobody knows” isn’t a rejection of evidence; it’s a critique of the kind of evidence that typically exists when markets move faster than longitudinal research. You can test acute toxicity. You can struggle to map ecological spillover, allergenicity across populations, cumulative exposure, supply-chain cross-contamination, and the incentives that shape which studies get funded.

Contextually, Rifkin has long operated as a public skeptic of techno-utopian narratives, especially where biology meets commerce. In the 1990s and early 2000s, GMOs became a proxy war over trust: who gets to define risk, who profits, and who bears the downside if “most” turns out not to be safe. The quote works because it refuses the comforting binary of “safe/unsafe” and aims at the real battlefield: uncertainty management as a form of power.