Sebastian Thrun Quotes

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

The public never knows what he wants, but he always wants what he knows.

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

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

I think our Western society is very much about, 'Tuck your head in; make sure you're safe. Don't rock the boat.'

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

The conventional wisdom of the United States is not always the right conventional wisdom.

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

Adults have pretty much made up their minds - they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.

What people think is their individual nature is just a bundle of thoughts, emotions, ideas, opinions, and prejudices. The world can do without this individuality.

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

Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Practically the whole human race is hypnotized because it thinks what somebody else told it to think.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

Through my observations, it became clear that most of society's rules and customs are rooted in fear and superstition!

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.