Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way.

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

Nobody else is stupid enough to get themselves into the straits that I get into.

What you don't do can be a destructive force.

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people's faces.

I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.

Do not they bring it to pass by knowing that they know nothing at all?

History sometimes makes fun of us and our best intentions.

My biggest misfortune, my greatest regret, is that I wish I'd cut my time with Clint in half. I wouldn't say I wish I never had the relationship, but I wish I'd found a way - I'd understood who he was, where it would end - five or six years earlier so I could have gotten on with things.

Looking back at that now I shudder at my naivety: while 'Men Behaving Badly' remains a brilliant sitcom, how did I ever aspire to Gary and Tony's eternal adolescence?

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.

Men of thoughtless actions are always surprised by consequences.

We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.

It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.

Without knowing myself, I have no real basis for thinking.

Every day I'm reassessing what I've been taught against what I see, and the man I need to be if I'm going to call myself a leader of anybody.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I'm not.

Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it's a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that's really chewing on us.

Without proper self-evaluation, failure is inevitable.

For me, there is only one means of ensuring that I do not lose respect for myself: constant criticism.