Theodore Zeldin Quotes

We are already seeing the creation of a new kind of network based on friendships: Startups, which are often founded by friends, are the beginning of something that could reshape social relations.

We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time.

Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

The Renaissance ... was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?

We should strive to be employed in such a way that we don't realize that what we're doing is work.

Everything I am going to say to you is the child of a conversation. [ ... ] That is the aspect of conversation that particularly excites me: how conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world.

To idolise a person means you don't get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don't need to talk to one another because you're the same person.

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.

Forks and spoons have probably done more to reconcile people who cannot agree than guns and bombs ever did

Literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principal that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.

I particularly value conversations which are meetings on the borderline of what I understand and what I don't, with people who are different from myself.

Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of our existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable.

Families have become models for public life, constructing friendships between individuals of different temperaments, ambitions and ages, even if they are often unsuccessful. People now want, above all, appreciation of their uniqueness.

Each civilization, each nation, each family, each profession, each sex and each class has its own history. Humans have so far been interested mainly in their own private roots, and have therefore never claimed the whole of the inheritance into which they were born, the legacy of everybody's past experience. Each generation searches only for what it thinks it lacks, and recognizes only what it knows already.

The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born.

The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

Brilliant lecturers shouldn't be wasted in lecture rooms: they should appear onTV. We need black market universities, in which people just help each other, and which don't leave out the poor.

The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.

All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

The French have made conversation their claim to civilisation.

The English reputation for humour is a way by which people avoid revealing themselves and have superficial relationships, so that you can engage in banter without making yourself vulnerable.