England is a slow moving country, reluctant to change—deeply reluctant to change.
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas--it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common
Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.
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.
Many people, companies, and organizations are trying to protect the past at any cost. We see this regularly in business as the incumbent vs. innovator fight, but I think it's more profound than that. It's literally a difference in point of view.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar.... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
Those who fear the new are the ones who have mastered the old.
I'm not terribly technological. I'm awfully backward about iPads and BlackBerries and suchlike; I still have a great fondness for Teletext, and I clung onto my fax machine for as long as I could, but eventually you have to move with the times.
Generally people are afraid. They pretend they aren’t; it’s part of the denial. We’re all part of it. As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what’s comfortable, and we’re afraid of the different. We’re afraid of change. It happened in Los Angeles, too, when the first models of Disney Hall were shown. You should have heard the outcry from the public, critics and press. It was called “broken crockery,” “outlandish” and blah blah blah. Of course now the feeling is different.
The adherents of the old order have a powerful ally in the natural law of inertia inherent in humanity which is … a natural defense against change.
Because we've always done it that way.' During my 12-year tenure as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, I heard those words all too often. The agency, in my experience, has an entrenched management culture resistant to change.
New ideas seem like frightening ghosts to people at the beginning; they run away from them for a long time.
Entrenched bureaucracies are always opposed to fundamental changes.
Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.
