Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.
I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don't agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses dissent against forced beliefs and highlights the ineffectiveness of coercion in changing one’s thoughts.
Alan Alda critiques the approach of using forceful means to impose beliefs, specifically through the metaphor of 'conversion by concussion', indicating that such tactics only alter superficial aspects of a person's thinking rather than fostering genuine understanding or belief. He argues that true belief should come from personal conviction and understanding rather than coercion, which merely changes the outward appearance of dissent without altering the internal beliefs.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of personal beliefs, this quote can emphasize the need for understanding rather than force.
More from Alan Alda
All quotes →Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.
Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.
Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.
If you know what you're looking for, that's all you'll get - what's previously known. But when you're open to what's possible, you get something new - that's creativity.
I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.
Similar quotes
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
In the chapel you prayed to be a saint and now I will make you a god.
Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.
It was a hollow victory they gave me. A crown...it was the girl I prayed them for. Your sister, safe... and mine again as she was meant to be. I ask you, Ned, what good is it to wear a crown?