Henry Miller Quotes

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

You are remembered for the rules you break.

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

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

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

If no one ever broke the rules, then we'd never advance.

Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.

Every rule should be broken at least one time.

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

Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

When you create something new, you're breaking tradition - which is an act of defiance.

In modern Western culture, the new is considered better than the old, and thus change itself is considered good; in tradition bound Arab cultures, the old is considered better than the new, and thus the retention of the existing order is good.

We did it just because it was forbidden.

Sometimes, when a tide starts to sweep, it makes no difference what the traditions are.

Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on.

I don't know what the next frontier is, but good comedy should put its toe into taboo waters. You have to transgress a little bit, and that area shifts with culture and with the year.

Gotta know the rules to break the rules.

I want to break standards.

Everyone talks about, 'Get your foot in the door,' but I never understood that mentality. Why would I want to go in that house? Why not build my own house? Why not take a chair and smash a window?

Everything established should go out the window. But I don't know how to do it. If someone knew how, it would have happened by now.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

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.

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.