"The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it"
About this Quote
E. B. White’s line has the quiet bite of someone who watched Americans sell themselves on “progress” while privately clinging to habit like a life raft. Calling change the only truly “common sense” flips a familiar phrase into a mild provocation: what we treat as practical wisdom isn’t stability or tradition, but the reality that nothing stays put. The joke, and the sting, is that we already know this. White isn’t diagnosing ignorance; he’s diagnosing recoil.
The syntax does a lot of the work. “In the long run” widens the lens to a timescale where personal preference becomes irrelevant, where history behaves like weather. Then he swerves into the intimate: “we all instinctively avoid it.” Instinct isn’t ideology; it’s reflex. That’s the subtext: resistance to change isn’t just a political posture or a generational quirk. It’s a human nervous system response dressed up as principle.
Context matters because White wrote through the century’s churn: world wars, the Great Depression, suburbanization, mass media, the mechanization of work and leisure. As an essayist who prized clarity and plain speech, he’s allergic to grand theories. He gives you a compact paradox instead: the one thing we can reliably expect is the one thing we’re wired to deny.
The intent feels less like scolding than like a nudge toward humility. If avoidance is instinctive, then moralizing about “embracing change” misses the point. The harder, more adult task is noticing our own flinch in real time, before we build a whole identity around it.
The syntax does a lot of the work. “In the long run” widens the lens to a timescale where personal preference becomes irrelevant, where history behaves like weather. Then he swerves into the intimate: “we all instinctively avoid it.” Instinct isn’t ideology; it’s reflex. That’s the subtext: resistance to change isn’t just a political posture or a generational quirk. It’s a human nervous system response dressed up as principle.
Context matters because White wrote through the century’s churn: world wars, the Great Depression, suburbanization, mass media, the mechanization of work and leisure. As an essayist who prized clarity and plain speech, he’s allergic to grand theories. He gives you a compact paradox instead: the one thing we can reliably expect is the one thing we’re wired to deny.
The intent feels less like scolding than like a nudge toward humility. If avoidance is instinctive, then moralizing about “embracing change” misses the point. The harder, more adult task is noticing our own flinch in real time, before we build a whole identity around it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
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