Sam Graves Quotes

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

Tradition" is very often an excuse word for people who don't want to change.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

Seabeck is slow to change.

Should bureaucratic ways prevail and paper reign supreme? Should red tape and the Status Quo become our nation’s dream?

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.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

Governments today are organizations of elderly men who know no other to work and govern than the ways of their youth.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.

What is the argument on the other side? Only this, that no case has been found in which it has been done before. That argument does not appeal to me in the least. If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still whilst the rest of the world goes on; and that will be bad for both.

The great mass of people are incapable of realizing that in economic life nothing is permanent except change. They regard the existing state of affairs as eternal; as it has been so shall it always be.

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.

The perils of change are so great the promise of the most hopeful theories is so often deceptive, that it is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if it can be done, even though, in point of argument, it should be utterly indefensible.

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.

Those who want things always to stay the same are not living in the real world.

I don't like change.

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed

. . . escape is easier than change.

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

it is always easier to do nothing than to try a new line of action.

Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.