“The best way to predict the future is to prevent it.”
Alan Kay

“… nothing is more difficult than to introduce a new order. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new…”
Noccolo Machiavelli, 1532AD

“… these examples share another characteristic that may help to make the case for the role of crisis impressive: the solution to each of them had been at least partially anticipated during a period when there was no crisis in the corresponding science; and in the absence of crisis those anticipations had been ignored…”
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“640,000 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody…”
Bill Gates, 1981

“A crisis can be defined as a severe change. It is interesting that the Chinese do not have a word for crisis. What they do have, however, is a two-word idiom: crisis equals danger and opportunity…”
Bennett Goodspeed, The Tao Jones Averages

“All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research…”
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“All truths go through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident”
Schopenhauer

“And after a paradigm shift begins, progress is fast and fraught with tension. People get angry. New discoveries pour in to support the new belief system and scientific revolution occurs… The important point in each instance is that the old ‘rationality’ is eventually replaced with a new, different, and more useful one…”
Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence…

“Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones…”
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“By relying on experts of opinion and numerical spreadsheets, businessmen and investors all too often were taken by surprise when conditions changed, because they analyzed rather than saw the world around them…”
Bennett Goodspeed, The Tao Jones Averages

“Champions of new inventions display persistence and courage of heroic quality…”
Edward Shon, MIT

“Change always implies abandonment. What you are abandoning is an old way of doing things. You’re abandoning it because it’s old, because time has made it no longer the best way…”
Tom DeMarco, Slack

“Every act of creation first of all is an act of destruction, because the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual world…”
Pablo Picasso

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win…”
Mahatma Ghandi

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers…”
IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943

“If people can explain most occurrences to their own satisfaction with minimal and local changes in their existing conceptions, they will rarely feel the need for drastic revision of these conceptions…”
Dan Kahneman, Judgement Under Uncertainty, Heuristics and Biases

“In a two-year period less happens than we would have thought and in a 10-year period more happens than we could have ever imagined…”
Paul Saffo

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory…”
W. Edwards Deming…

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years…”
John von Neumann, 1949

“It’s like standing at the beach and trying to stop the water from coming in”
John Bonano… Faster

“Life happens to the left of the decimal point…”
Roger MacNamee

“Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year, no one calls it progress. People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force…”
Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now

“People hate change… And that’s because people hate change… I want to be sure that you get my point.  People really hate change. They really, really do.”
Steve McMenamin Atlantic Systems Guild

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal…”
Albert Einstein

“Technology is not kind. It does not wait. It does not say please. It slams into existing systems… And often destroys them. While creating a new system…”
Joseph Schumpeter…

“The history of technology predictions is a resource to be mined, not a pile of failed futurology to lampoon…”
Michael Shrage, MIT’s Technology Review, October 2004

“The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996…”
Robert Metcalfe

“The significance of crisis is the indication they provide that an occasion for re-toolong has arrived…”
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them…”
Albert Einstein

“There is no reason for individuals to have a computer in their home…”
Ken Olsen, 1977

“To resist change is like holding your breath-if you persist, you will die…”
Lao Tsu

“You lay a new strategy on top of all your other strategies. This uber strategy is simple: Build a company that’s so flexible and responsive in the short and long term that you don’t care what happens. As long as there’s a lot of noise and disorganization and change, you’ll win…”
Seth Godin, Fast Company

"Trevor: “Are you saying you’ll flunk us if we don’t change the world?” Eugene: “Well, no. But you might just scrape by with a C…”
From the movie Pay It Forward