Margaret Deland Quotes

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

I think it's fantastic when the young enrage their elders. I really do believe that if it's too loud, you are indeed too old, and that if it has been standing for too long, it needs a thorough inspection.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.

Mainstream science starts as heresy.

Being a game changer to me means changing the way other people see things.

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.

If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.

He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

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.

Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

Know yourself and fit yourself to new fashions. For there is a new ruler among the gods.

None save great men have been the authors of great heresies.

Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

Conformists die, but heretics live forever.

It would be wonderful if ideas could be the new rock 'n roll

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.