The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping the old ones.

As the economist J.M. Keynes said: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones.

The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be for most readers if the author's assault upon them is to be successful, — a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.

You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.

Another thing to watch out for is your own doubt. Doubt is one of the ways that your old patterns will try to defend themselves. The conditioning of the mind wants to just repeat the past over and over again, and it will try to reject new things.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

People do tend to avoid new realities; they'd rather just add details to the old ones. It's as simple as that.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.