Viola Davis Quotes

All of us are living with dogmas that we accept as truths. When one of these is overturned, there's an initial gasp, soon followed by a rush of exhilaration.

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in.

I felt the need to unlearn my formal education.

And as long as we believe what we believe - until that is questioned - there's no progress as a human race. Again, we still have war. So, effective rehabilitation is to question what we believe. When that happens, everyone gets out of prison.

As you know, the best way to solve a problem is to identify the core belief that causes the problem; then mock that belief until the people who hold it insist that you heard them wrong.

My approach to creating content is focused on pulling people out of their intellectual comfort zones. I'm interested in presenting ideas in unique ways that challenge people to question their assumptions.

It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently. I've written this book, and I don't think differently.

I like to go after the foibles, basically of beliefs that are held without question. If people still want to believe in their stuff after that, that's great - as long as they just have a chance to step back and look at it for a second. Sometimes, you don't even realize what you've been thinking for 20 years.

The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds.

For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.

Many children are taught to believe in God. I came to believe in the power of systems analysis.

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

I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

People have to be pushed out of their comfort zones to be able to see things for what they are.

Westboro's fire and brimstone message was the air I breathed all my life. But after joining Twitter at the age of 23, I encountered people who challenged my beliefs and unearthed contradictions my blind faith had missed.

It's important to have people who will question you occasionally.

I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.

Examine what you believe to be impossible, and then change your beliefs.

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, "What would happen if everything I thought was 'wrong' was actually 'right'?"

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.