Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

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.

… 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.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

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

The pioneers get all the arrows.

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

All adventure is now reactionary.

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

I'm an optimist - that's why I try to invent different systems; otherwise, I may as well stop right now. Sometimes I get the feeling the French cinema holds on tightly to what exists already.

I just know that I'm innovative. I'm a quick thinker... In Washington, I just want to be a senator who finds a way to drive change and not figure out a way to conform.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

Nobody says you have to be shackled to tradition.

We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.

Piety and virtue lie in obedience and conformity, while nothing is more repugnant than change and innovation.

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.

What makes our world so fascinating is that continuously there are novel and creative ideas spurring people to leave old ways and try something new.

To endeavor to rehabilitate the sabbath of our forefathers is as foolish as to try to make people go back into log houses and cook in a fire-place. Some persons can never realize that the world grows; that what was a help to one age becomes a hindrance to another; that time corrects the mistakes of men and that respect and reverence for our ancestors does not necessarily require us to adopt their clothes or their habits.

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

Novelty even is useful if a general opinion prevails that the old way is bad.

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.

Please, join the modern world.

Without imagination, I don't think there's any progress.