Pico Iyer Quotes

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

If you're ahead of your time, who's going to listen? If you're behind the times, it's boring.

Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.

Like all pioneers I have labored more in faith and hope.

Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

The American Dream can no more remain static than can the American nation.... We cannot any longer take an old approach to world problems. They aren't the same problems. It isn't the same world. We must not adopt the methods of our ancestors; instead, we must emulate that pioneer quality in our ancestors that made them attempt new methods for a New World.

Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world. There was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.

Be respected as being new, and probably a decent change or a help for the human race or whatever, instead of keep carrying the same old burdens around with you.

To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.

I'm fifty years ahead of my time.

Frankly, I like new things. I feel like I made a contribution to building a more interactive world. And I'm proud of that.

The problem with me is that I am fifty or one hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers have had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.

I think we are living in a time, where as a whole, as a community, people do want to push the boundaries.

Every great advancement was once nothing more than a dream in the mind of a visionary.

It is only by doing things others have not that one can advance.

Unfortunately, our existing traditional thinking habits insist that you must attack something and show it to be bad before you can suggest a change. It is more difficult to acknowledge that something is excellent and then to ask for change because although it is excellent, it is not enough.

One of the key things in the tech business in particular is that you need to be able to push boundaries.

A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.

I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule. Clarence Birdseye

I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.

The job isn't to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.

I was always 'awake'...Some part of me clamoring for NEW insights and NEW ways to make the world a better place.

Everyone now claims to be a moderniser and it's obvious, really. I mean, no one now says 'We need to go backwards... to the days of Lord Salisbury'.

When we point to obstacles we inhibit progress. When we offer solutions we advance.