Quotes from Theodore Zeldin

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.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

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

People in this world of superficial communication find themselves isolated and lonely and have difficult in talking about personal things that really matter to them.

Each person is an enigma. You're a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.

We cannot change public life until we have changed private life.

Conversation creates a new kind of network within organizations. Current networks are used for competitive advantage, but conversation is focused on encouraging people to realize their potential.

I think it's impossible to predict the future but it is possible to look at the past and see how one can do differently from what one's ancestors have done and learn from their mistakes, and one can see how even though there are enormous forces which stop one doing what one wants to, there are little holes in which the individual can do something.

It's easy to say, 'I'm anti-capitalist,' or, 'I'm anti-Western decadence,' without having to be challenged about what that actually means, or how you might go about reshaping society to make it better.

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

The French have made conversation their claim to civilisation.

So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.

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

Gastronomy has done more to bring together people of the world than any guns ever could.

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

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.

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, to attempt to increase, by even a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world.

A dream is what makes people love life even when it is painful.

People are going to be living quite soon for 100 years. Our idea of how a family works no longer applies. It's no good saying you're going to have children for 15 years and then you're going to retire and have hobbies, because you've got 40 more years to go after 60 and you're in good health until 90 or something.

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.

Never before have humans been so ambitious, have they thought that they could be much more than their parents were.

I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.

I think the hero in our generation is not the individual but the pair, two people who together add up to more than they are apart.