Talk:Theodore Zeldin

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 * All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.


 * Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.


 * Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.


 * It's up to us to decide on the kind of conversations we have. The way we talk at the office or factory shapes the work we do; it's not just machines which force us to be obedient. I want to show how we could make our work a lot less boring and frustrating if we learned to talk differently.


 * No amount of status or reward will compensate for your inadequacy as a human being.


 * [Socrates] introduced the idea that individuals could not be intelligent on their own, that they needed someone else to stimulate them. ... His brilliant idea was that if two unsure individuals were put together, they could achieve what they could not do separately: they could discover the truth, their own truth, for themselves.


 * Technology does not automatically improve conversation, communication or behaviour.


 * The great attraction of fashion is that it diverted attention from the insoluble problems of beauty and provided an easy way— which money could buy... to a simply stated, easily reproduced ideal of beauty, however temporary that ideal.


 * The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.


 * To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction.


 * We risk impoverishing ourselves more than we know if we sideline the personal dimension of life.