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.
Interpretation
Conversations should focus on creating equality and understanding rather than personal gain.
The quote emphasizes a shift in the purpose of conversation from a self-serving approach to one that fosters equality and understanding among individuals. Theodore Zeldin urges us to engage in discussions that promote connection with others and contribute positively to society, highlighting the potential of dialogues to transform our world into a more inclusive space.
In practice
A speaker at a conference discussing the importance of inclusive dialogue.
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.
I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?
There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.
Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned.
There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.
Victory and defeat are each of the same price.
Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
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