Unwillingness to Change Quotes

If you say something in advance - if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.

… people reject the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views.

Trump cannot change because in his mind, he has ALWAYS been rewarded for his boorish, stupid, arrogant behavior.

I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it's a naivete that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.

If you think you're doing everything right, then you have a tendency to stand pat.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

Most men … can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

You can't teach an old hater new truths.

For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

You've tried to reform what will not learn. Shut doors on traits that you wish were dead; They will open a window and return.

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.

So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.

It's so easy to be boxed into one part and one part only.

Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless.

Far too many of our elected officials are chained to an ideology that is rooted in the past. They are keepers of normalcy who embrace things as they've always been.

Failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision

I've never been impressed with bureaucratic tradition. I don't like it when the parties come to me and say, 'This is the way that it's always done, judge.' I never found anything in the oath I took or the statutes I was asked to look at that said, 'Judge, stop thinking, because this is the way it was done before.'