Andrew Thomas Quotes

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

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

I think I'm very old-fashioned.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

You see, I am a very conventional scientist, really.

A friend often says I'm an old man in a young man's husk. I like that. I am old-fashioned in some ways.

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

I'm a traditionalist.

I'm a traditionalist. I have certain values I live by.

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional framework.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.

I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.

Traditional wisdom is long on tradition and short on wisdom.

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas

Books are certainly old fashioned, but only people with a very limited perception are silly enough to condemn ideas because of their age. It is, of course, equally silly to condemn the new fangled simply because it is strange.

We don't need men with new ideas as much as we need men who will put energy behind the old ideas.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

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.

Flowers are red, and green leaves are green. There's no need to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.