Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The chaos in our world may have brought you close to despair, but if you are willing to look at reasons for hope, perhaps you are ready for the 'Aquarian Conspiracy.'

- Marilyn Ferguson

Problems can be experienced as... a chance for renewal rather than stress.

- Marilyn Ferguson

You can break through old limits, past inertia and fear, to... richness of choice, freedom, human closeness.

- Marilyn Ferguson

I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass. So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric - not arithmetic - impact. This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Achievers have an enabling attitude, realism, and a conviction that they themselves were the laboratory of innovation. Their ability to change themselves is central to their success. They have learned to conserve their energy by minimizing the time spent in regret or complaint. Every event is a lesson to them, every person a teacher.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Public policy is designed by spin doctors who aim to keep our heads below the water. The public good is not a consideration, and their self-serving agendas prevail over common sense.

- Marilyn Ferguson

A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical changes in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history... this benign conspiracy for new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history.

- Marilyn Ferguson

After a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light in the words of the popular song the 'Age of Aquarius,' the time of the mind's true liberation.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The ferment and viability in any society is directly proportionate to the number of people actively living their ideas. This is not positive thinking - it is positive action: the spirit of experiment.

- Marilyn Ferguson

You can certainly make the case that we're devolving, that it may already be too late to save the rain forests, let alone the planet.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We get 150 notices a week for seminars.

- Marilyn Ferguson

I didn't intend to go into the seminar business.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Radical common sense is the wisdom gleaned from the past that recognizes the perishable opportunities of the moment. It is the willingness to admit error and the refusal to be deterred by failure.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Everybody knows that love is better than hate, and peace is better than war.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Although focusing is best pursued as a deliberate strategy over a period of time, it is also valuable as a kind of psychological first-aid, as useful to a distressed, 'stuck' person as a tourniquet to an accident victim.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Most of us are having to invent, discover, and create the next steps of our lives without a light, a map, or a relevant tradition.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We are going to see a burst of creativity that will make the Renaissance pale in comparison.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We appear to have form, but we are like a whirlpool. We appear to have form, but we are just whirling electrons.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Awakenings occur when we lose faith in the viability of our institutions and the authority of our leaders. Religious and spiritual awakening gives people a new vision of themselves, which is then transplanted into social action.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The paradigm of the 'Aquarian Conspiracy' sees humankind embedded in nature. It promotes the autonomous individual in a decentralized society... The new perspective respects the ecology of everything: birth, death, learning, health, family, work, science, spirituality, the arts, the community, relationships, politics.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Despair is a cop-out, the ultimate abdication of all responsibility, in which people feel justified in their feelings of impotence. But if, on the other hand, you feel that your work in the world does make a difference and that you do have the power to change things, the nay-sayers will turn a deaf ear.

- Marilyn Ferguson

There is a better place, the hard but joyful work beyond struggle, beyond the shadow of a doubt. It is our real home, the long-remembered future when everything worked and things made sense.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The struggle to make people understand the need for change is over.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We rarely think to mark the trail for others to follow. 'Live and learn,' we say, acknowledging the value of experience. We usually forget about 'Live and teach.'

- Marilyn Ferguson

I feed on conferences.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

- Marilyn Ferguson

If you start thinking of stress as not a bad thing but inevitable, resulting in change that itself leads to transformation that leads to sharp and radical changes... it can be a very useful way of thinking.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We should not become so ashamed of the disappointments and travesties of democracy that we become ashamed of the idea itself. It is the outer reflection of our self-acceptance.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The brain's calculations do not require our conscious effort, only our attention and our openness to let the information through. Although the brain absorbs universes of information, little is admitted into normal consciousness.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Yes, an individual could be electronically stimulated to fear, anger, or euphoria from a distance. However, the procedure is complicated, not always accurate, and far too tedious and expensive as a method for taking over control of the world.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Evolution happens in jumps, very rapidly.

- Marilyn Ferguson

A self-defined challenge is an irresistible teacher.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We are constantly nothing but a bunch of energy being processed. Into this whirlpool, the more complex the system, the more energy it requires to hold it together. Therefore, the more complex - the scientists call it 'coherent' - the more fluctuations are possible.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Power is changing hands, from dying hierarchies to living networks.

- Marilyn Ferguson

'Focusing' is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body's wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

- Marilyn Ferguson

In the most important areas, as individuals and countries, we don't change our behavior until we have our backs to the wall.

- Marilyn Ferguson

You can be more productive, confident, comfortable with insecurity.

- Marilyn Ferguson

It is a dark, unspoken truth that the powerful - the 'ruling class' - make up the rules as they go along.

- Marilyn Ferguson

If the thing that you want to happen is happening... it's no longer a movement.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The New Age, I think, is a term that is well laid to rest.

- Marilyn Ferguson

People are seeking more power in the individual and less in government and institutions; they want more cooperation and less competition.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

- Marilyn Ferguson

'Aquarian Conspiracy' is the term I have coined for the network of people working for social transformation based on personal inner change. Such a notion is not at all alien to the American milieu.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Victory doesn't lie in taming our nature but in progressively discovering and revealing more of it.

- Marilyn Ferguson

The best artists are scientific, and the best scientists are artistic.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

- Marilyn Ferguson

We have new ways to be born, humane and symbolic ways to die, different ways to be rich... new ways to be human and to discover what we are to each other.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Academicians get nowhere.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Leadership desperately needs women.

- Marilyn Ferguson

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

- Marilyn Ferguson

People who have discovered a purpose feel better, like themselves more, age more subtly, and live longer.

- Marilyn Ferguson