Henning Mankell Quotes

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave way to bigger states. There was much more trade and travel going on than before. To people in the cities the experience of living in a small place where you knew everyone and governed your affairs by consensual democracy had been lost.

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The late '60s certainly was one of them, the Civil War being another, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many.

I think that once somebody sees something, or feels it in the consciousness of society, it starts to allow change for other people.

How is it possible that in just the last ten years all of these things which were taboo throughout our culture, throughout the culture, things that were taboo are now not only normal but celebrated, and people who were not really supportive of them are called kooks and the new weirdos?

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

I titled my book "Revolution." And that is exactly what it is. France is experiencing a time of transformation - in education, on the labor market and in the pensions system. We're talking about a cultural revolution.

If my goal is to change Colombia, which it is because I really think Columbia has to change in many, many ways - I think it has to be a very profound, nearly spiritual maturing process in the Colombian society because I think you have to first be aware of what's happening and it's not easy because many people don't want to see what's happening.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

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

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

The way even movements change is stunning: Chinese communist capitalists? Evangelicals deciding to be nice to gay people?

Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.

Social change can be seen as a mosaic, taking that which is broken and creating something new.

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

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

I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.

It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

If you want change, it has to be generational.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.

You're 25 and you're looking at adults of your parents' age and older saying, "I don't want to live that way," and this is how it happens. It evolves slowly and it's not the result of any movement. It's just young people look at the way their parents are living and if they don't like it they don't want to duplicate it.

It is terrifying to people when women step up and start owning the story that they have not owned. And I'm seeing so much of this, and it is a seismic shift.