Theodore Zeldin
Theodore Zeldin
Theodore Zeldinis an Oxford scholar and thinker whose books have searched for answers to three questions. Where can a person look to find more inspiring ways of spending each day and each year? What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology or therapy? What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or who feel isolated or different, or misfits? Each of Zeldin’s books illuminates from a different angle what people can do today that they...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth22 August 1933
Families have become models for public life, constructing friendships between individuals of different temperaments, ambitions and ages, even if they are often unsuccessful. People now want, above all, appreciation of their uniqueness.
People are going to be living quite soon for 100 years. Our idea of how a family works no longer applies. It's no good saying you're going to have children for 15 years and then you're going to retire and have hobbies, because you've got 40 more years to go after 60 and you're in good health until 90 or something.
Brilliant lecturers shouldn't be wasted in lecture rooms: they should appear onTV. We need black market universities, in which people just help each other, and which don't leave out the poor.
Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.
The English reputation for humour is a way by which people avoid revealing themselves and have superficial relationships, so that you can engage in banter without making yourself vulnerable.
Only when people learn to converse will they begin to be equal.
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.
The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.
Forks and spoons have probably done more to reconcile people who cannot agree than guns and bombs ever did
We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.
We are already seeing the creation of a new kind of network based on friendships: Startups, which are often founded by friends, are the beginning of something that could reshape social relations.
I don't think there is anything a man can do that a woman cannot do.
The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.
No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller... whose overcoming of her blindness and deafness were arguably victories more important than those of Alexander the Great, because they have implications still for every living person.