Felix Adler Quotes

Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.

My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.

I shall not grow conservative with age.

I never stop making sure that what I say is the best of what could be said about a particular thing. It's a constant evolution. If I planted a tree one way yesterday, and somebody tells me of a better way to plant a tree, I think, 'You know, they're right, that's better.' Then I change my way to accommodate the new way of planting trees.

I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.

I do not come bearing a party label on my sleeve - or a quick fix in my back pocket. I do not come with a rigid ideology in my heart - or a soul that tells me to go it alone. I do not come to uproot tradition - or to be imprisoned by it.

My father was a progressive farmer, and was always ready to lay aside an old plough if he could replace it with one better constructed for its work. All through life, I have ever been ready to buy a better plough.

If the individual is to be happy in the contemporary order, he must be open-minded with respect to new values and new arrangements.

I will adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

We would be the worst of fools if we would ever lose this extraordinary capacity to go beyond the limits of past thought and past prejudices.

To doubt one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don't defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don't be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

Small people delight in what they call consistency-that is, it gives them immense pleasure to say that they believe now exactly as they did ten years ago. This simply amounts to a certificate that they have not grown-that they have not developed-and that they know just as little now as they ever did. The highest possible conception of consistency is to be true to the knowledge of today, without the slightest reference to what your opinion was years ago.

I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.

will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.

I really had no religious upbringing, which is unusual. But I think it saved me, because when I found the theory that I wanted to follow, I did not have anything to unlearn.

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.

I find that it's almost essential to fall in love with an idea to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it's just not what it could be. Too often, organizations are good at the first part, but struggle with the second. And so we defend expired business models, support the status quo and have a knee-jerk inclination to preserve what we've got.

I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.

People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often

The only phrase I've ever disliked is, 'Why, we've always done it that way.' I always tell young people, 'Go ahead and do it. You can always apologize later.'

I just think it's ridiculous to be dogmatic and be caught in the past. You have to be open, aware, nimble and flexible about changes in the world.

Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress.

People try new things all the time. By now, the people who succeed have to be very sophisticated.