Edward T. Hall Quotes

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

It's very hard for all of us, when we've committed ourselves to a particular interpretation, to change our minds.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

Sometimes there is no sugar-coating it. Sometimes you have to challenge people's belief systems in a progressive way.

I felt the need to unlearn my formal education.

It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.

To learn is to change how you think.

The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, "What would happen if everything I thought was 'wrong' was actually 'right'?"

Sometimes it's more difficult to achieve a 10% cost reduction than it is to tell people they have to achieve 50%. Small incremental steps block your view of doing something fundamentally different.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.

People's minds can change very quickly.

I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes.

The most difficult thing is changing people's mindset.

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn.

A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.

...nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It...makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded....Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

And as long as we believe what we believe - until that is questioned - there's no progress as a human race. Again, we still have war. So, effective rehabilitation is to question what we believe. When that happens, everyone gets out of prison.

It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.

He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.

How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.