Changes

"Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and distructuive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdoms of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratories of history. A youth boilnjg with hormones will wonder why he should give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraits if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it-perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more viral than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; that is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classe, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.