Holbrook Jackson Quotes

One who accepts the general ideas of his time gets along smoothest, but he does least for progress.

What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.

All great truths begin as blasphemy. Every single revolutionary idea that has ever been visited upon the human experience began as an idea which was rejected.

Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom.

We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

I love challenging the status quo.

We need role models who are going to break the mold.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

A key ingredient in innovation is the ability to challenge authority and break rules.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

Question the status quo at all times, especially when things are going well.

You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

Yet you must not cling to the words of the old sages either; they, too, may not be right. Even if you believe them, you should be alert so that, in the event that something superior comes along, you may follow that.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

The man with a new idea is a crank until his idea succeeds.

I always grew up with, 'Question authority.'

The people that were most interesting were always questioning the status quo.

Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round, and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost.

If people are telling you that they don't believe what you're doing, that means you're doing something out of their comfort zone. And generally, people don't want to be taken out of their comfort zone because it's outside of the status quo.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

he thoughtless knowers will call you a red or a communist or a capitalist or some name that expresses their aversion to any mental activity. But somebody must take a chance. The monkeys did who became men, and the monkeys who didn't are still jumping around in the trees making faces at us monkeys who did.

The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe! The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first doubt, man has continued to advance.

I've learned never to close my mind to an idea simply because it seems miraculous.