Douglas Engelbart Quotes

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.

Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.

When a new idea assaults the power of established authority, authority always screams out that morality has been affronted. It makes no difference if this idea is that the world is round or that women should vote or that the workers should control industry.

Historically the mainstream media has never been particularly friendly to any socially progressive ideas.

Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move.

Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.

The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most expert of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.

All progress and growth is a matter of change, but change must be growth within our social and government concepts if it should not destroy them.

In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

Ideas really do matter. But in any organization a good idea will only go so far unless its proponents are willing to fight the political games to get the idea adopted.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.

To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

Baseball people are generally allergic to new ideas; it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms, and it is the hardest thing in the world to get Major League Baseball to change anything—even spikes on a new pair of shoes—but they will eventually...they are bound to.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

Throughout history, people with new ideas—who think differently and try to change things—have always been called troublemakers.

Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them. Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.

If you want to promote anything, all the work that you put into it is basically promoting the idea of it so that people will go for it. And if they don't go for it, you can't institute it. You can't do it.

In order to change the system, we need to change our ideas.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Whenever new ideas emerge, songs soon follow, and before long the songs are leading.

It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.