John Maynard Keynes Quotes

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.

Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it:; once you can honestly say, "I don't know", then it becomes possible to get at the truth.

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, 'Oh, no; that'll never work. It's too different.'

People who have a new idea often just stop having an old idea.

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.

The old ideas won’t do.

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn.

It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.

It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths, as to root out old errors; for there is this paradox in men, they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.

The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.

It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit