Quotes by Theodore Zeldin

“The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an e...”

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

“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.”

“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 ret...”

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

“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.”

“I invented something called The Oxford Muse. The Muses were women in mythology. They did not teach or require to be worshipped, but they were a source of inspiration. They taught you how to cultiva...”

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

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

“The temptation before 1933 was to believe in Hitler as a savior, to believe in a national rebirth. The path to National Socialism led through a wasteland of personal fears, collective anxiety, and ...”

“Even Gandhi, with all his charisma, did not melt the hearts of his oppressors, as he had hoped. After softening, hearts harden again. Asoka too was wrong to think that he was changing the course of...”

“It takes a long time for people to recognize their soul-mates when they have too limited an idea of who they are themselves.”

“No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller... whose overcoming of her blindness and deafness were arguably victories more important than those of Alexander the...”