Theodore Zeldin

“The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I'd like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“In every life there is an element of victory over fear, which needs to be searched for, though it may be a false victory.”