Daily Inspiration Quote by Rip Torn

Rip Torn’s line lands like a shrug from someone who’s watched every shiny innovation get treated like a moral crisis. “Anything new” is deliberately blunt, an actor’s way of cutting through polite euphemisms about “change” and “progress.” The punch is in the reflexive “always”: not sometimes, not by certain people, but as a default human setting. Torn isn’t really talking about gadgets; he’s talking about fear dressed up as righteousness.

Calling the new “the devil’s tool” is a sly jab at how societies outsource anxiety to mythology. Instead of admitting, “I don’t understand this” or “I might lose status,” institutions and communities reach for supernatural language that flatters them as defenders of virtue. It’s a neat piece of cultural judo: the future becomes sin, and resistance becomes heroism. That’s the subtext Torn threads through with a performer’s economy - no sermon, just a grim little pattern you can recognize in everything from early reactions to rock music and television to moral panics about video games, the internet, and now AI.

Coming from Torn, whose screen persona often carried a volatile mix of authority and mischief, the quote reads as both warning and wink. He’s puncturing the self-seriousness of gatekeepers: the people who mistake discomfort for discernment. The intent isn’t to crown “new” as automatically good; it’s to expose how quickly we sanctify our own suspicion.