Peter Senge Quotes

As long as we accept alien definitions of reality and internalize them, we remain powerless. If we can emerge with such new definitions and not be so thoroughly intimidated by the existing paradigm, we can begin to collect on our destiny.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

You can't change what you don't understand.

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.

You don't want to know the Truth, you want to know the truth as you understand it. This is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment. You think you already know the truth! You think you already understand how it is. So you agree with everything you see or hear or read that falls into the paradigm of your understanding, and reject everything which does not.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous power. Among the powers of the weak, I think the first one is the power not to believe the powerful.

I teach people to question their thinking, and this changes their world.

Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies "on the side of belief and persuasion." If we are to counter violence by offering young people ways to think differently about their world and the choices before them, they must be empowered to recognize themselves in any analysis of violence, and in doing so to acknowledge that it speaks to their lives meaningfully.

No enlightened person would deny its premise, but as an ongoing program it is monotonous, limited, locked in a perception of victimization.

When you think about people, you give them power.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Timidity betrays want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.

Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom.

I am looking at you and you are looking at me. This is very good. I am looking and I am liking. You are looking and you are thinking, 'I hope she doesn't hit me with her crop.' But that is because I am me and you are you.

All of our issues come from us not being aware enough or not seeing through our problems to the depths of the issues.

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.

When we truly recognize that our beliefs are that powerful-we hold the key to freedom.

You must always remain master of the situation and do what you please. No school tasks, ah, no! no tasks!

I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it. That's what people generally assume. But actually, the way you think determines the way you're going to do things. Then you don't notice a result comes back, or you don't see it as a result of what you've done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking. Is that clear?