Tom Hayden Quotes

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

When push comes to shove, the status quo is a very powerful force.

We, as a society, have become very fixed in our ideas of how things were, how they are, and how they should be.

We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.

I am a Conservative, so I don't wish to be seen as a rebel, particularly, at all.

Most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

When exactly were we brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls.

We are not free, it was not intended we should be. A book of rules is placed in our cradle, and we never get rid of it until we reach our graves. Then we are free, and only then.

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

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.

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse, fashionable fascism dominates the scene.

Old custom is hard to break and scarce any man will be led otherwise than seemeth good unto himself.

I think it's important that we run that tension between the way things are, in terms of the way we're governed, and the way we sort of become complacent.

...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

How will the world change if we do not question it?

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is.