Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

Dogmatism makes for scientific anemia.

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

Failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision

Nobody wants to change.

I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

There’s too much orthodoxy in the political process today.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

I have often thought that one of the less attractive traits of various professional bodies and institutions is the deeply ingrained suspicion and outright hostility which can exist towards anything unorthodox or unconventional.

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

It liberates the vandal to travel-you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.

One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat that they stop rowing. We can never get ahead that way.

The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

We are addicted to being the way we are

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.