Robert Heilbroner Quotes

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

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

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

You cannot make a living on the past …the stone age did not end because they ran out of stones.

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 circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

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

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.

It is hard to say what the future holds, but this is probable - it won't be just like the past.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

You can never plan the future by the past.

You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.

Conservation destroys the present. If we are only busy preserving the past, we are not living in the present and unable to look forward. I am against conservation. We should let young people move forward, whether we agree with them or not. We should let new things happen.

Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

We don't have to be imprisoned by the past. When something isn't working, we can and should change.

Without reforms we will repeat the failures of the past.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

The standards of the past are not the standards of the future.

Experience forced on men’s minds the conviction that what had ever been must ever be.