Walter Becker Quotes

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn't work today.

The times change, and if you don't change with them, you get left behind.

Time will change and with it music will too. Our speed has changed, clothes have changed, food habits have changed, so why should music remain the same?

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.

An ounce of logic can be worth more than a ton of tradition that has become obsolete through the weathering of time.

People are always talking about the old days. They say that the old movies were better, that the old actors were so great. But I don't think so. All I can say about the old days is that they have passed.

Advice may not be good advice 10 or 15 years from now. Someone could tell you something years ago and it might not work now. The world is constantly changing. One word could mean something different today. Today you can't give advice to anyone.

Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Look - There's good creepy and there's bad creepy. Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.

The Conservative Party mustn't sound like the old man on the park bench who says things were better in 1985, or 1955, or 1855.

If Sir John A. MacDonald or any other leader of that day were here now, he would have a different program from that of sixty years ago. He sought to give his people policies suited to the time in which he lived.

The modernity of yesterday is the tradition of today, and the modernity of today will be tradition tomorrow.

Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.

You've got to change with the public's taste.

The original 'Edge of Darkness' was fantastic, a fabulous series. It was of its time, but this film version shows that times really haven't changed.

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

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

One who uses an ancient rule to govern the present does not necessarily see the changes that have taken place.

We live in a changing world … shall we maintain all our theaters in the same traditional box.

History shows us that the youth are usually a step ahead of their elders when change is required.

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.