Jacque Fresco Quotes

No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns.

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.

Prejudice is a learned trait. You're not born prejudiced; you're taught it.

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

A decent man who doesn't consider himself a bigot can indeed be trained to behave like a bigot if he welcomes feedback exclusively from those who consider bigotry no big deal or, indeed, an attribute to be admired.

You've got to be taught to hate and fear.

Honestly, racism is something learned, not something that you just pick up one day and wish to dislike someone.

Hate is taught; victimhood is taught.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.

No one is born with hate in their heart. Hate is something that has been taught. It is not an innate survival skill that we need; It is a form of stupidity that penetrates our minds and will eventually destroy us.

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. Racism is not genetical. It has everything to do with power.

We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

I don't want to see trickle down racism. I don't want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nature. And trickle down racism, trickle down bigotry, and trickle down misogyny, all these extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America.

You have to be taught to hate.

You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way. But the slanting process is so subtle that you frequently don't realize how you're being slanted until very late in the game.

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.

No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.

Every word is a prejudice.

Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.