Initial Skepticism Quotes

I know it's hard for people to imagine a time when 'Hamilton' wasn't 'Hamilton,' but for years, it was just this little thing that I was telling people about that didn't make any sense to anybody as I was describing it. But I loved it.

Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general.

If you're sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I'm going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you've got a heart at all, I'm going to get it.

Notwithstanding these major arguments the wave theory initially did not meet with complete acceptance.

I remember seeing the first LEGO movie, almost skeptically. People were like, 'You should really see it!' And I was like, 'A LEGO movie?' And then, I was like, 'This is really good!'

I have my own boat, but when I first thought about taking a cruise, I thought, 'You're going to trap me on a boat, and I'm going to walk in circles and go crazy,' but it's awesome.

When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it.

Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don't get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.

Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.

No fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation. Equally, there is nothing so mighty or so marvelous that the wonder it evokes does not tend to diminish in time.

The first time I heard Johnny play at the Fillmore East, I wasn't really impressed. He had come on the scene with everybody telling me how great he was, and I didn't hear it.

'Beasts of the Southern Wild' was one of those films that I felt like I could dismiss because it received so many accolades, but then I watched it and was won over.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

When I first broke out, everyone was like, 'OK, so is this a joke?' They had to wait until I sold out shows before newspapers started writing about it.

I remember when we did 'Shaun of the Dead,' and when we were trying to get it off the ground in 2001 before we actually made it, a lot of people just didn't want to know.

When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.

To be honest I never thought the acting thing would get off the ground.

The first time I heard a Billie Holiday record, I thought, 'What's so great about Billie Holiday?'

You know, 'Peepshow,' in retrospect that seems like a good fit for me, but in the beginning, I'm sure you remember, nobody was sure if the show was going to last. Everybody was like, 'What are you doing? You can't sing, and you can't dance. What are you doing in this show?'

My sister was always supportive. When I first moved to L.A., she was like 'I know you can do it!' But my parents, in the beginning, not so much. They were kinda like, 'I'll believe it when I see it.' But when I actually started booking things, my dad was like, 'Oh, I knew it all along.'

I'd say there was a fair amount of skepticism at the time about whether the Internet held any promise. And of course I felt that it did.

The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.

I thought Twitter was a joke. I really thought it was a gag. I thought it was like National Lampoon or the Onion.

When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the soul's temperature with respect to it is usually very cold. Only gradually does the idea develop its warmth, and it is hottest (which is to say, exerting its greatest influence) when belief in the idea is already once again in decline.

When I first got pitched on Uber, I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.