Paddy Ashdown Quotes

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

Which goes to show you, you can make all the laws you want, but you cannot change people's ways. If you must change them, you have to understand that it will take a long time.

We were raised to believe that our way of seeing the world was the only way.

When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.

Only here, because of the illusion of intellectualism, our society separates the validity of human expression.

Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker - as I said earlier, you can't change people's minds, but you can get them to think.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

I think culture precedes politics, and I think the attempts to try and legislate people's behavior... isn't going to be productive until the culture decides what they want to achieve.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have struggled and sung the blues, is, like very best theories of human behavior, immune to falsification by mere evidence.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

We have religious superstitions of the Middle Ages that shape our 21st century social policies.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

The system of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society…They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things.

What the people believe is true.

Man is as the Lord made him. But we can change our institutions.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

Because we're brought into the world or educated in a certain way, we're trained to accept the world in a certain way.

Everyone has images in their mind of what to expect from different groups.

I can't control what other people think.

Legislation has a certain jurisdiction. It can't change mindsets and hearts.