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

often fear new technologies and

She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.

The concept of change baffled them.

Nowadays the average reader doesn't even look for new ideas-he is suspicious of them. For too long now he has been hoodwinked, palmed off with bogus ideas masquerading as genuine ones. Still unable to figure all this out, he is drawn to the other extreme, to anything beyond the bounds of his primitive reasoning process.

People are often afraid of things that sound new. Like robots.

Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past.

Change scares people. Makes them dangerous.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

People don’t fear change. They fear loss.

The loss of comfort. The loss of certainty. The loss of who they thought they were.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Change threatens, and its possibility creates frightened, angry people. They are found in their purest essence on the extreme right, but in all of us there is some fear of process, of change.

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call “misoneism,” a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But “civilized” man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.