Peter Senge Quotes

When somebody grabs a movement, you're kind of locked into it. It's all par for the course.

I guess, just being in a group, I had never thought to question my individual artistry.

It's true that every leader needs followers. We can't all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous - especially for an entity in formation.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.

Stop thinking, and end your problems. What difference between yes and no? What difference between success and failure? Must you value what others value, avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous!

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.

We keep so busy talking we are so keen to act that we forget that in the heart lies all we need untapped, intact.

We're not really good at knowing what we want, and we are quick to say 'this sucks'. That's where the opportunity lies.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

Cooperative living can develop only as individual persons become able to see their own weaknesses and strengths as well as the weaknesses and strengthen of others.

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

How do I know that I know this, except that I've always been taught this and never heard anything else? [...] How sure am I of my own views? Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay, because you're in the safely moral majority.

Ultimately peer pressure can lead people to bully, but peer pressure can also say bullying is not acceptable.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

Every aspect of your personality, if you're wise, you're able to separate each one of them and put them to use at the best time for the best position.

Sure there are a few good whites just as much as there are a few bad Blacks. However what we are concerned here with is group attitudes and group politics. The exception does not make a lie or the rule - it merely substantiates it.

Be loving, and you will be lovable. Be open and receptive to love.

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

Choosing not to act on an angry impulse and to feel the pain that lies beneath it is a very courageous thing to do.

The mind knows only what lies near the heart.