Henry George Quotes

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

The remedy for our social evils does not consist so much in changing the system of government as it does in increasing the general intelligence of the people so that they may learn how to govern.

The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.

As a kid, I was searching for my tribe of other people who saw through the matrix. Even as a kid I could never buy into the status quo. I just thought it was a joke; I couldn't believe other people weren't laughing at it.

I'm still basically an idealist, which translates into getting real things done to make people's lives better.

The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.

We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.

There is a chalk outline slowly being drawn around common sense and most people can't identify the victim.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.

If people aren't educated, they can't question. If they can't question, they can't change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.

Most people don't see that they have options beyond what society tells them to do. That's the biggest problem. They honestly believe that compliance is the shortcut to success.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

The trouble is that America's become a utopia accessible only to some people. Others get trampled on. Perhaps it's a problem of size. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, once gave the ideal number of a given community as 148. That seems about right to me. There's something idealistic about that - in a group of 148 people you can get to know everybody.

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.

Whether we're talking about the New Deal or the Great Society: they didn't come about because they wanted to buy people off with "hush money." They were the outcomes of struggles. They were the outcomes, in the 1930s, of a viable socialist-communist movement. They were the outcomes of a viable workers' movement. FDR didn't give in because he wanted to shut people up, he gave in because he was under pressure. He had no choice.

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.

I love radical theorists. But at the same time, I don't agree with them a lot, but I love their theories. I love how they intellectualize rage, and this inner battle that such a tiny percent of people really care about. I find that the most interesting.

In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it.