James H. Billington Quotes

All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.

To innovate is not to reform.

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

The spirit of the age is the very thing a great man changes.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

Innovation never comes from the established institutions.

You need to be a little crazy to change the world, and you can’t really fake it.

Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

I love challenging the status quo.

In any industry, the people with the freshest ideas usually come from outside.

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.

Wanting to reform everything is the same thing as wanting to destroy everything.

Great institutions can only be reformed by stealth or by revolution.

The French higher education system has not adapted to this revolutionary period. [It] rewards people for their capacity to follow the path that is open to them. It does not encourage people to rebel or to develop their character.

Leaders are people who ‘walk ahead,’ people genuinely committed to deep changes, in themselves and in their organizations.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution.