Leonard Shlain Quotes

Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.

Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.

Usually the first problems you solve with the new paradigm are the ones that were unsolvable with the old paradigm.

I don't think I'm as revolutionary as Galileo, but I don't think I'm not as revolutionary as Galileo.

The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.

A change of values - that means, a change of the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

If there can be some paradigm shift thing that you can be part of, that's cool.

The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution.

Innovation violates tradition--attacks it in public and steals from it in private.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

People die when curiosity goes.People have to find out, people have to know. How can there be any true revolution till we know what we're made of? 830

Your current thinking got you here. Only new thinking will get you out.

Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

Jobs was brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.

True genius can be identified by the fact that its expression changes the world into something it has never been before.

I like to break down barriers and I think that Hollywood is doing the same thing over and over. I want to do something new and say, "Let's evolve as artists!"

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?

A symptom of the revolution: When we state something is impossible in theory, but then change our minds when we discover that it is possible in practice.

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.