Change Blindness Quotes

I'm not one of those freaks who can't see anything past 1977.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

The profession of economists seemed permanently conservative in its mode of thinking—always the last to know when old verities were crumbling and new ones emerging. As a group, they defended the status quo, whatever it was, until real events destroyed it.

Everyone sort of lives with their rulers in the past and doesn’t look at coming changes.

We transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there.

I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be killed, boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behaviour.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.

I have this idea of myself that I decided when I was 12 about who I am and how I come across and what the world is like. And if I have changed or the world has changed, I don't even notice sometimes because I'm holding on to these old ideas. I am more confident - the music is proof. But I can see the change there much easier than I do as a human.

People who say they don't see the acceleration of innovation is a wilful blindness. We are innovation at a wonderful speed for the basic things we think everyone should get.

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

The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. . . . Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware . . . still clinging to things that no longer exist.

Some people don't even notice. "Oh, you sound exactly like you did!" And I say, "OK, if that's what you want to believe, that's fine."

One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change.

There is a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured.