Gerry Adams Quotes

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

Every single change is fought by those who would be affected by it.

Progress is never accepted by everybody.

Most want progress but hardly anybody wants change. Change is almost always a little traumatic.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it.

Change will always be violent.

Anyone who is a leader for reform will accumulate enemies over time.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Conservatives want to keep things as they are, while revolutionists turn things upside down.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

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

First rule of change is controversy. You can't get away from it for the simple reason all issues are controversial. Change means movement, and movement means friction, and friction means heat, and heat means controversy.

We do not need more status quo.

The way I look at the world is establishment versus change agents. The establishment is those people who want to keep things the way they are. Change agents are people like me.

I've never believed that Things Should Continue As They Are.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

I really think it would be cowardly to pull back and not challenge the status quo, when the status quo may not be the right way for the field to go.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.