William M. Daley Quotes

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think.

I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out.

She live in a mindset that I could never move to

When we have learned something, there's this thing called belief perseverance. Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.

Fundamental assumptions in general and scientific assumptions in particular are so hard to overturn because they are based on belief. Beliefs are so hard to overcome because they are irrational and therefore do not yield to logical argument.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

Democrats believed in "progressivism." They believed in Big Government. But they at least attached optimistic outcomes to it. They really believed they were helping America. They really believed they were helping families, helping people. Now they've just become, "The country's horrible, it's rotten, it needs to be reformed!" The liberals of John F. Kennedy's day did not think there was anything really major wrong with this country.

We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.

A man will never change his mind if he have no mind to change.

This white woman came up to me, and I'm thinking, WOW. When I was a kid, she would have been robbed and raped and left for dead. This is a real strange scenario, and I just wanted to cry. I'm like, "Who am I? Where's my heritage?

The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.

What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.

I think if you're open-minded, the road will take you where it takes you. If you're closed, you might not get to go where the road is heading.

There is an understandable vindictiveness in people who come from Communist countries. They want to keep telling us that we were fools to think that we could make radical changes in our society. Though I understand their dismay, respect their suffering and don't understand the gullibility of some people who don't take in how repressive these societies are, I still think it's important to keep people of all kinds as active in civic matters as possible.

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.

Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.

What I consistently say to young people - I say it in the United States, but I'll say it here in Germany and across Europe: Do not take for granted our systems of government and our way of life. I think there is a tendency, because we have lived in an era that has been largely stable and peaceful, at least in advanced countries, where living standards have generally gone up, there is a tendency I think to assume that that's always the case.

Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.