David Bohm Quotes

Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you're doing it. It is a deep-seated habit.

In order to practice dialogue, you need to be able to set aside your assumptions and try to listen more than you want to talk. It's not always politically correct to be able to do that, but it can give you a better sense of the reality.

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness.

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, 'Well, you're Christian, you're anti-this and that, and I hate you.' But to me, it's more interesting to say, 'What is this person like and how do they really think?'

When there is a problem, always identify and evaluate your underlying assumptions that may be contributing to the problem or preventing you from seeing the problem clearly.

I have learned the hard way to mind my business, without judging who people are and what they do. I am more troubled by the lack of space being provided for the truth to unfold. Humans cannot seem to wait for or honor the truth. Instead, we make it up based on who we believe people should or should not be.

Don't believe everything you think - or feel.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

When you talk, you only talk about something that you already know. But when you listen, you can learn something you don’t know.

Being unbiased is a lot like being humble: as soon as you think you are, you aren’t. Neither are a finite state of being but a continuous struggle to not allow our perspectives poison our opinions.

Judge Learned Hand once observed that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” If we don’t accept others’ good faith and the limitations of our own expertise—if we are so quick to attack others’ errors that we forget how often we too are wrong—the enterprise of free speech is fraught, and the spirit of liberty of which it is part is at peril.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt - to me, anyway - is what makes you human, and without doubt, even the righteous lose their grip, not only on reality but also on their humanity.

All evils to which so many become addicted begin in the mind and in the way one thinks.

It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That's not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as 'the other side.'

The biggest learning during my tenure as a captain was that, a lot of time, I used to think that this is common sense. But no, there is nothing called common sense.

Wisdom comes out of dialogue so you have to develop the capacity to expose your own ignorance in order that they may discover their own wisdom.

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making.

Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind.

From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying: 'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.

I want to make people think, and I don't want to come across like I am egotistical or that I want to change people's thoughts. I don't believe that as a comic I can convert anyone's opinion. I think I can maybe make someone look in one direction or the other but I can't make a religious person stop believing in God.

Only humans are judgmental, and because you are, you assume that I must be. Yet I am not, and that is the great truth you cannot accept.

Think before you speak. Think before you judge. Think before you think you have a person all figured out.