Matteo Renzi Quotes

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything... or nothing.

The right is so reactionary it goes nowhere.

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

France has chosen to ignore the great transformation of the 21st century and cultivate a [culture of] status quo and rigidity.

Defending yesterday … is far more risky than making tomorrow.

The men who control the CIA are of an older, conservative generation which has kept the agency fifteen or twenty years behind the progress of the nation at large.

We [Republicans] don’t need any new ideas.

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

No government of which I am a member will ever be a government of reaction.

Far too many of our elected officials are chained to an ideology that is rooted in the past. They are keepers of normalcy who embrace things as they've always been.

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

As a country, we should be moving forward, but instead conservative lawmakers keep dragging us back.

Conservatism... offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Proverbial wisdom counsels against risk and change. But sitting ducks fare worst of all.

Everyone now claims to be a moderniser and it's obvious, really. I mean, no one now says 'We need to go backwards... to the days of Lord Salisbury'.

Reform can only move forward. It cannot stagnate. Even more so, it can’t move backward.

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of its exhausted ideas.

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

The old ideas won’t do.

I am not a post-liberal and I do not think that such a return to full 19th-century anticlericalism inevitable or even likely - which is one reason among many that I doubt the bargain many religious conservatives have made with Donald Trump.

We Republicans need to look at the future instead of living in the past.

If I'm too busy looking in the past, how can I see what's in front of me with the future?

We don't want to live in the past; we want to go into the future.

I want Europe to go forward, not backward.