You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create an alterative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp.

Then he laughed and realized that he had started to change as soon as he had learned to laugh at himself and at what he had been doing wrong. He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly - then you can let go and quickly move on.

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

First, satirical laughter and dissenting silence are nonviolent ways of fomenting social change. People who turn to nonviolence in the face of cruelty and injustice have a much higher claim to good manners that leaders who clothe themselves in piosity and patriotism to justify economic and military violence.

In laughter, we learn to discern the difference between reality and illusion, which serves us well amid the smoke and mirrors of political life. In silence, we remember that someday we will die, which gives us the courage to speak our truth, no matter what the punishment may be.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.