David Plouffe Quotes

I had a very insightful friend who warned me back when I stopped reading scripts, 'It's easier to change directions while you're still moving.' If you stop, it's harder to get started again. I still don't think I made the wrong decision, but he was right.

Normally, you should be dead if you have a retrospective.

England is a slow moving country, reluctant to change—deeply reluctant to change.

Senior military officers will not accept defense reform unless it is forced upon them.

Well, back to the old drawing board.

You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'

I don't like change that much.

People are stubborn, and sometimes even if change is good, people will always oppose change.

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

Inertia is comforting, and Americans will be extremely reluctant to make any change that might affect their high standard of living.

It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

It is not too late to turn things around.

When failure is not an option, we can forget about creativity, learning, and innovation.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

Right now you are one choice away from a new beginning.

There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.

does a sick society get so used to its illness that it can't remember being well? what if the memory is too dangerous for the people who like things the way they are?

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

Kitten, you still haven’t told her? Blimey, what are you waiting for?” “The Second Coming of Christ!” I snapped.

I keep telling you the future isn't set in stone. It's not all decided yet. The future is just what's down the road we decided to walk on today. You can change roads anytime. And that changes where you end up.

If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?

To 'turn around' is to end up facing the same way. Maybe that is the problem, all the turning organizations around.