Francis Cornford Quotes

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

Let me just say this - sometimes being a trailblazer is highly overrated.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

As beautiful as simplicity is, it can become a tradition that stands in the way of exploration.

Tradition" is very often an excuse word for people who don't want to change.

Those who govern us know it well, for they would sooner deny us bread than dare alter the observance of tradition.

Rule, and change nothing.

We have no precedents to guide us, and that is a glorious thing, for precedents, like other guides are disposed to grow tyrannical and refuse to let us do anything on our own initiative. Life grows wearisome in the countries where precedents and conventionality is rule and nothing can happen unless it has happen before.

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

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.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.

What is the argument on the other side? Only this, that no case has been found in which it has been done before. That argument does not appeal to me in the least. If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still whilst the rest of the world goes on; and that will be bad for both.

Precedents establish expectations of what is fair. Does fairness require the perpetuation of unfair, unwise, or even dangerous past precedents?

My parents are not people who would want to rock the boat. They wouldn't break the law.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon.

Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.

The new is threatening to those who have mastered the old.

Most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

I am now going to make you a gift that will stay with you the rest of your life. For the rest of your life, every time you say, "We've always done it that way," my ghost will appear and haunt you for twenty-four hours.

All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!