78 Quotes by Theodore Zeldin

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.

Forks and spoons have probably done more to reconcile people who cannot agree than guns and bombs ever did.

To idolise a person means you don’t get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don’t need to talk to one another because you’re the same person.

Brilliant lecturers shouldn’t be wasted in lecture rooms: they should appear onTV. We need black market universities, in which people just help each other, and which don’t leave out the poor.

We should abolish ‘work.’ By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time.

We should strive to be employed in such a way that we don’t realize that what we’re doing is work.

The fear of loneliness has been like a ball and chain restraining ambition, as much of an obstacle to a full life as persecution, discrimination or poverty. Until the chain is broken, freedom, for many, will remain a nightmare.

Everybody’s style of speaking is a mixture of echoes dating from different epochs of the past: hers recalls the prudent and modest civil servants of the last century who were proud that they represented the state and who took care not to compromise themselves by saying the wrong thing.

When two people talk with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, to get inside their skin, they change the world, even if it is only by a minute amount, because they are establishing equality between two human beings.