institutional resistance Quotes

We must bear in mind, then, that there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things, whilst those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.

If there was acceptance of the mentally ill in the Catholic Church, the entire Curia would resign!

When they told me I couldn't sit on the Senate floor with an iPad - that the technology wasn't even permitted - I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.

Since it is one of the great attributes of our species to be susceptible of improvement and capable of experiencing the most beneficial changes, for this reason what are vulgarly called 'venerable establishments' will often range themselves in opposition to the best interests of the community.

There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one - the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession - at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all.

Most sports federations, corporations, and governments don't change voluntarily. Change is brought by the disenfranchised demanding better.

I spent 17 years inside an institution trying to effectively destroy it; can you imagine how popular I am in Brussels? I am the most hated figure that's ever been in that place. Every time I get up to speak, hundreds of people boo and jeer.

My answer is that [Donald] Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he's had every establishment off side; Trump doesn't have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies... big foreign money ... are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

In the end, I think, the state's rigidity is a function of its own insecurity, its indecisiveness.

The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived.

Even talking about change can be threatening to entrenched interests...Careers in the Pentagon, the board room, or the halls of Congress are not advanced by creating the disruptions that go with real change, so there are very few voices willing to speak up for the future and move beyond rhetoric to make serious choices.

There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress. The majority consciousness has changed, and often that has made very clear, practical changes in our daily lives, but the centers of power are still not occupied, for the most part, by this new consciousness.

Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization

Trying to make things work in government is sometimes like trying to sew a button on a custard pie.

At Swarthmore, the Dean of Women was very opposed to women going into science or engineering - so opposed that if she couldn't talk a girl out of it, she just never had anything more to do with her for the four years she was there.

For more than a hundred years much complaint has been made of the unmethodical way in which schools are conducted, but it is only within the last thirty that any serious attempt has been made to find a remedy for this state of things. And with what result? Schools remain exactly as they were.

The problem is that every single person here was elected under this system. It is not typical of human nature to change what works.

There are lots of incredible people who are working in very flawed structures that are designed to keep us apart, so we're going to have to figure this out. The first stage is just talking about it openly: We are all working within structures where there is a disincentive to do what we most need to do, which is come together. I don't know what the answer is but I definitely think that that first stage is just being honest about it and trying to speak about it in a way that is not just accusatory.

The punditry snicker, the politicians sneer, and the editorialists scoff, but the American people speak and Donald J. Trump rises - commandingly so - confounding the powerful institutions of Washington D.C. and New York and earning him the ire of both.

Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity. The young must be dampened down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment.

Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

Bureaucracy is adept at protecting its nest.

A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.

Once created, federal programs are nearly impossible to eliminate.