Adam Curtis Quotes

Philly is a place where people love change as long as things stay the same for them.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.

Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn't entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.

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

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

If computers remain far worse than us at image recognition, a certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level.

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

Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself. Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups.

One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.

I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer.

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.

Rule, and change nothing.

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

The people are difficult to govern: It is because those in authority are too fond of action [change].

We don’t want to break what isn’t broken trying to fix what is.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

A society based on … reality must reconcile in its life, the categories of permanence and change.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

The move to modernity has its risks but the greater risk is not moving at all.

These reforms will not be popular with everybody—especially those who are doing just fine under the present system.

Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.