Dick Gregory Quotes

There are two methods of human activity - and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: One use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn't do was bad.

People like change in general, but not in particular.

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?

I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people.

Acknowledge the complexity of the world and resist the impression that you easily understand it. People are too quick to accept conventional wisdom, because it sounds basically true and it tends to be reinforced by both their peers and opinion leaders, many of whome have never looked at whether the facts support the received wisdom. It's a basic fact of life that many things "everybody knows" turn out to be wrong.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood

When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

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

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.

As human beings, why does it take somebody to feel like they're close to us for us to see their humanity? Why can't we see the humanity in people that are distant from us?

Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

People are strange when you're a stranger.

People are quick to jump to conclusions.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

What people are perceiving will dictate what their life and ultimately what your interaction is.

People--stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

I just happen to believe that people are not stupid.