Lawrence Lessig Quotes

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.

The conventional wisdom of the United States is not always the right conventional wisdom.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.

If an idea is indeed sensible, it will eventually become just part of the accepted wisdom.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

My greatest surprise was that so much of what we think is common sense is just prejudice, and so much of what we think is scientific fact is about as scientific as the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

It's a rare moment when we take a break from the tribulations of the daily rat race to reflect on assumptions and values that we casually accept as gospel.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

There are certain things which the average Irish mind will never allow as debatable.

Conventional wisdom is not always wrong.

… an old idea is not necessarily a good one — slavery is an old idea; so is polygamy.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Conventional wisdom

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.