Lawrence Lessig Quotes

When You Hold Onto Your History, You Do It At The Expense Of Your Destiny.

Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

Building the future holds more attraction than ancestor worship, whichever ancestor we're talking about.

You can't live in history. You've got to build for the future.

It is well that the beaten ways of the world get trodden into mud : we are thus forced to seek new paths and pick out new lines of life.

Too much we have lived in our history. We must live in the future.

To endeavor to rehabilitate the sabbath of our forefathers is as foolish as to try to make people go back into log houses and cook in a fire-place. Some persons can never realize that the world grows; that what was a help to one age becomes a hindrance to another; that time corrects the mistakes of men and that respect and reverence for our ancestors does not necessarily require us to adopt their clothes or their habits.

The past should have a vote but not a veto.

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 make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.

A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner.

I love and revere the rich and proud history of America. And I am determined to take our best traditions into the future. But with all respect, we do not need to build a bridge to the past. We need to build a bridge to the future.

When I stop learning something new and start talking about the past versus the future, I will go.

Whatever worked in the past, build on it; whatever didn't work in the past, break the chain that binds you to it.

Positive change always encounters resistance, conflict, and obstacles. We must embrace difficult and heated situations in life, for that is the method of igniting our reactions in order to transform them.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

As beautiful as simplicity is, it can become a tradition that stands in the way of exploration.

The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

I believe in the old, because it shows us where we come from - where our souls have risen from. And I believe in the new, because it gives us the opportunity to create who we are becoming.