Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

How is it possible that in just the last ten years all of these things which were taboo throughout our culture, throughout the culture, things that were taboo are now not only normal but celebrated, and people who were not really supportive of them are called kooks and the new weirdos?

Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.

Society never progresses because the majority one day wakes up and says, “Let’s do things differently.” The majority didn’t wake up and say, “Oh, let’s just free the slaves.” ... Society always progressed because a relatively small group of people — usually considered outrageous radicals by the status quo of their time — had a better idea and articulated another way. That’s simply how evolution works; it’s the mutation — the member of the species who does things differently - that points the way to the future because they’re better adapted for survival.

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

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

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.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

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

… there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

Progress is never accepted by everybody.

We will pay a heavy price if we insist on navigating the 21st century with a 20th century mindset.

There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it

Common sense means living in the world as it is today; but creative people are people who don't want the world as it is today but want to make another world.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny