Charles Duhigg Quotes

There’s something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

When you have people together who believe in something very strongly - whether it's religion or politics or unions - things happen.

Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything.

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.

I guess I'm interested in people and society and what we do collectively in the realm of decisions that shape our world. You know, at least on a human level.

I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.

Truth is whatever people will believe.

I believe it's true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.

Sociologically, large groups of people don't generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.

What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.

I think that things like curses or whatever - those labels - come from belief systems, universal belief systems. So when you get a global consciousness of something, then that becomes a quote-unquote "truth" for everybody. You know, "This is what happens in the Kennedy family." "This is what happens with the Hemingways." And the more people believe in it, the more it kind of resuscitates the problem; it keeps bringing life to this idea that a curse exists that you can never get out from under.

If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

We can bring to earth a new world from the ashes of the old because our union transforms us the powerless into the powerful. And I ask you to join together in using all that power-all that strength to make the dreams of all workers and communities around the world come true.

I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn't like.

I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

When all else fails to organize the people, conditions will.

The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.

When somebody comes up with a progressive idea, to begin with, you're mad, bonkers. Then if you go on, you're dangerous. Then there's a pause. Then you can't find anyone who can say they thought of it in the first place. That's how progress is made. This is why I do believe in the vote. In the end, all these people who've been tempted to the right realise the warning lights in their constituency are brighter than the bright lights from No. 10 offering them things.

My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy.

We are the people and America is really nothing without the people. We have to take control and we have realize as young people that this is our future. We have to live here and this where we'll one day raise our own children.

There is something about participating; it is almost my religion. If the world is still here in 100 years, people will know the importance of participating, not just being spectators. Millions of small groups around the world, that don't necessarily all agree with one another, are made up of people who are not just sitting back waiting for someone to do things for them. No one can prove anything, but of course if I didn't believe it had some kind of power, I wouldn't be trying to do it.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore

Sociologically, I think it is the most important thing going on in the world today. Because you can't change people by force. Communism made a great mistake in trying to inflict its beliefs on everybody. People have to find their own understanding, and if you can offer them an example that will inspire, they will come naturally to it. Ananda tries to offer this inspiring example.