Willis Harman

Willis W. Harman (August 16, 1918 – January 30, 1997) was an American engineer, futurist, and author associated with the human potential movement.

• To whatever extent the science of the past may have contributed to a mechanistic and economic image of man and a technocratic image of the good society, the new science of subjective experience may provide a counteracting force toward the ennobling of the image of the individual's possibilities, of the educational and socializing processes, and of the future. And since we have come to understand that science is not a description of "reality" but a metaphorical ordering of experience, the new science does not impugn the old. It is not a question of which view is "true" in some ultimate sense. Rather, it is a matter of which picture is more useful in guiding human affairs. Among the possible images that are reasonably in ac-cord with accumulated human experience, since the image held is that most likely to come into being, it is prudent to choose the noblest.
  • "The New Copernican Revolution", in Stanford Today (Winter 1969) reprinted in Robert Theobald (ed.) Futures Conditional (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972) pp. 188–89

• Society gives legitimacy and society can take it away.
  • Attributed, in Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life (NY: W. W. Norton & Co, Inc, 2003) p. 243

Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century
Indianapolis, IN: Knowledge Systems, Inc

• Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in.
  • About the Book

• Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds — sometimes only a little bit.
  • About the Book

• By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world.
  • About the Book

• Encyclopedic article on Willis Harman on Wikipedia