Theodore Zeldin

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The world is... often terrifying, disgusting and tragic, but it is also beautiful. I should like to know how exactly each person would make it a tiny bit less disgusting and a tiny bit more beautiful.

What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.

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