IC’s Familiar Quotations on Innovation
Here it is, people - as Ed McMahon would say, “Everything you ever wanted to know about innovation quotes is in this list.” Some pertain to business, some to art, some to politics. Some will make you think, others will make you scowl.
You have no idea of the massive scope of this effort. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, months into decades. The things I do for my readers.
So without further ado: “Innovation Catalyst’s Familiar Quotations on Innovation.”
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“Innovation violates tradition—attacks it in public and steals from it in private.” - Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Fourth Selection, New York (1987)
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…. the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” - Peter F Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
“Technological innovation has done great damage … to eating habits. Food is now available in such unpleasant forms that one frequently finds smoking between courses to be an aid to digestion.” - Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, part 2 (1978)
“Pure innovation is more gross than error.” - George Chapman (British dramatist, poet, translator), King Henry, in Bussy D’Ambois, act 1, sc. 2, l. 38 (1607)
“A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” - Edmund Burke (Protestant political writer), Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 29, ed. Pocock (1790)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.” - Herbert J. Gans (German–born U.S. sociologist, educator), Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, ch. 1, Basic Books (1974)
“Innovation is a pirate ship that you create and sail under cover of foggy darkness into the safe harbor of your competitors.” - Larry Keeley, lecture at UCSB, 1995
“I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.” - Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law,” The Essays (Les Essais), bk. I, ch. 23, Abel Langelier, Paris (1588)
“Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.” - Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Thirteenth Selection, New York (1994)
“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.” - George Santayana, “Reason in Religion,” ch. 7, The Life of Reason (1905-1906)
“There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.” - Roger Scruton, “In Defence of Bourgeois Man,” Untimely Tracts, St. Martin’s (1987)
“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” - Winston Churchill, Address to Royal Academy of Arts. Quoted in Time (New York, May 11, 1954)
“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.” - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 3, ch. 21 (1840)
“Once again, this nation has said there are no dreams too large, no innovation unimaginable and no frontiers beyond our reach.” - John S Herrington, US Secretary of Energy, on asking Congress for funds for giant $6-billion atom smasher, a project he likened to the 1969 manned landing on the moon, NY Times 31 Jan 87
“The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Conservative,” lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, Massachusetts, December 9, 1841.—Nature, Addresses and Lectures (vol. 3 of The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson), p. 273 (1906)
“Like the international avant-garde, rock-and-roll is the creative product of a rebellious youth culture trying to reach a mass audience. Its artists embrace technological innovation … Although pop music has its individual stars like Elvis and Madonna, most rock musicians, like the international avant-garde, work collaboratively, in bands. But however much a rock-and-roll group may initially appeal to a specific youth subculture, its potential for vast global audiences is different from that of fine art, which remains within the arcane reaches of high culture.” - Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art, ch. 10, Penguin (1995)
“Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?” - Ralph Waldo Emerson , “Education,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883, repr. 1904)
“To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine color that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poor discontents.
Which gape and rub the elbow at the news
Of hurly-burly innovation.”
- William Shakespeare, King Henry, in Henry IV, Part 1, act 5, sc. 1, l. 74-6
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