Tom Peters Quotes

The opinions of people are determined by their interests.

Ideas matter because they can actually alter people’s conception of their own self-interest..

Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.

The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don't know what's going to matter in the future

Only ideas won by walking have any value.

People are more interested in ideas than dress.

We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.

By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!

I don't see people as groups, I see them as individuals.

I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.

I like criticism, but it must be my way.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.

An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

One bit in or out of focus makes the difference between our bodies being ourselves and our being part of a group. I want to melt the idea of specificity and blend individuality into the crowd.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

I think everyone does selective reading. Everybody has a filter, and that is real easy for critics to see things from their perspectives, and I'm going, I didn't mean that at all. And believers do the same.