Clay Shirky Quotes

What got us to where we are today is not going to get us to where we need to go tomorrow.

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

I realised that you couldn't use the tools of yesterday to communicate today's world. Basically, that was the big light that went on in my head.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

Conservation destroys the present. If we are only busy preserving the past, we are not living in the present and unable to look forward. I am against conservation. We should let young people move forward, whether we agree with them or not. We should let new things happen.

Absolutely everything undergoes evolvement - whether it's technology, journalism, the NFL, medicine.

We should not fear what is new, but we should not throw out that which is in the past but is still valuable.

The person who insists on using yesterday's methods in today's world won't be in business tomorrow

You got to do what's happening today in the world. You got to keep up with time. Keep up to date, keep modern - keep up on your toes!

If we are to make the most of the opportunities ahead we need a bold break with the past.

To stand still today is to go backwards...and quickly...!

Today's innovation is tomorrow's tradition.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

When you carry yesterday's thinking into today, you program tomorrow to be like yesterday.

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change

If you never take a risk, you will never know what changes you need to make.

If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.

I'm old enough to remember the advent of CD. You thought, "What's this piece of space age technology that's in front of me?" Now I ask, "When's the last time you bought a CD?" You see things come and you see things go, and you have to be on your toes and be nimble and stay with it, or you die. It's exciting. I love technology.

At least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you'll never begin.

I wrote newspaper articles professionally for seven years, and I love newspapers. I'm hopeful that new business models will emerge that allow the newspaper culture to genuinely thrive in the digital age.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.