Clay Shirky Quotes

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

If you want to really change something, do not try to fight the existing reality. create a new reality.

The establishment can't change. It can't give people anything different; it can't make the turn.

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.

Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

Even talking about change can be threatening to entrenched interests...Careers in the Pentagon, the board room, or the halls of Congress are not advanced by creating the disruptions that go with real change, so there are very few voices willing to speak up for the future and move beyond rhetoric to make serious choices.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.

When failure is not an option, we can forget about creativity, learning, and innovation.

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

I always had some kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.

The status quo is never news, only challenges to it.

Creative ability is often mistakenly attributed to inborn talent. It is about all the ability to connect one thing with another.

As a creative person, you need to sort of spread your wings and try different things out because each one really does inform the other.

If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

You'll never do anything creative, innovative or world changing if you fear criticism. Pioneers are easy targets for arrows!

When you don't have much money, you get creative. There's so much money that gets wasted on big movie sets. But when you don't have much money, you improvise.

Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.