Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Ideas and movements often shift to their opposites while keeping the same label or name over time.
In plain terms
Things change to become their opposite but keep their original name.
What can you take from it?
Be wary of assuming a label guarantees the same meaning.

Where it applies

  • political analysis
  • organizational behavior
  • historical study

Putting it to work

  • verify current meaning of terms
  • track ideological shifts

Questions to consider

  • Does this term mean the same today?
  • How have our values shifted?

Another view

Some concepts maintain core principles despite superficial changes.

More from G. I. Gurdjieff

  1. The being of two people can differ from one another more than the being of a mineral and of an animal. This is exactly what people do not understand. And they …

    Permalink to quote #24
  2. Objective knowledge, the idea of unity included, belongs to objective consciousness. The forms which express this knowledge when perceived by subjective consci…

    Permalink to quote #26
  3. Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small 'I's, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into c…

    Permalink to quote #23

Related quotes

  1. Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

    Frank PittmanFrank Pittman quote #4
  2. The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and a…

    Randall JarrellRandall Jarrell quote #7
  3. My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and po…

    F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald quote #11