Rose Wilder Lane Quotes

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

We should be pushing our boundaries. After all, we Britons are explorers and adventurers.

Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.

What really excites me in a project is when it goes in a way you haven't been before.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past.

If you think 20 years out and ask what's the most important company on the planet, it is not any company you could write down today. The most important company 20 years from now has not even been founded yet and doesn't have a name.

... the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space.

The past does not equal the future.

On the day a country decides not to invest a cent in innovation, discovery or exploration, that country decides to be a tributary to others.

The fun is in always building something. After it's built, you play with it awhile and then you're through. You see, we never do the same thing twice around here. We're always opening up new doors.

Some things are going to work, some aren't. But there's always something new going on, so it's fun to watch and see what's coming next.

And in reaching out and doing these new things you get into this strange kind of shape where you are better off than if you were just resting, because you're using things that wouldn't otherwise be mute.

Discovery is for forward lookers.

Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

If we have too much clarity, we might not be compelled to continue searching for new ideas.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

Progress is not a straight line; the future is not a mere projection of trends in the present. Rather, it is revolutionary. It overturns the conventional wisdom of the present, which often conceals or ignores the clues to the future.

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

I decided this early on at Justice: if the traditional way was the most effective way of doing something, then we'd maintain it. But if it was not functioning at optimum levels, we would be doing the country a disservice by continuing to do things "like we've always done them."

I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment.

We have a process that continually looks back to him for guidance, but it also combines that with a tremendous amount of discovery and invention, as well, because of the demands of the medium and the opportunities of the medium.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

I like pushing the envelope. But I don't like to do it just for the sake of doing it.

You can't be a sort of pioneer.