Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Progress depends on novelty, but comfort depends on familiarity, and Kettering skewers the cozy hypocrisy that tries to have both. “People are very open-minded about new things” starts like a compliment, the kind innovators want to believe. Then the rug-pull: “as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.” The joke lands because it exposes how “open-minded” is often just branding for low-risk continuity. We’ll applaud the future, provided it comes in the same packaging, speaks the same language, and doesn’t ask us to rewire our habits or status hierarchies.

Kettering wasn’t a salon wit; he was an inventor who lived inside the machinery of adoption. In early-20th-century industry, the technical problem was rarely the only problem. New systems had to fit existing infrastructures, jobs, and anxieties. That’s why so much innovation arrives disguised as an “upgrade” instead of a rupture: electric lights designed to mimic gaslight’s glow, early cars styled like carriages, today’s “AI assistants” framed as just better search. The subtext is pragmatic, not nihilistic: people can handle change when it preserves their sense of competence and control.

The line also takes a swipe at institutional rhetoric. Organizations praise innovation while rewarding predictability; they fund “disruption” that doesn’t disrupt their revenue model, their org chart, or their self-image. Kettering’s intent is a warning to inventors and leaders alike: if you want the new to survive, you either smuggle it in wearing the old’s clothes, or you prepare for the backlash that comes when novelty refuses to pretend.