"Too often new ideas are studied and analyzed until they are suffocated"
About this Quote
Pollard’s line lands like a rebuke aimed at the respectable people in the room: the ones who mistake caution for wisdom. As a 19th-century clergyman, he’s not attacking thinking itself; he’s warning against a particular moral failure that often hides behind “discernment.” The verb choice is the tell. Ideas aren’t merely rejected or disproven; they’re “suffocated,” killed slowly by over-handling, committee talk, and the endless demand for proof before permission. Analysis becomes a pillow.
The intent is pastoral and political at once. In an era when Darwin, industrial capitalism, higher biblical criticism, and modern science were destabilizing inherited certainties, institutions learned a defensive reflex: treat the new as a specimen, put it under glass, and keep it from breathing in public life. Pollard frames that reflex as a kind of cowardice dressed up as diligence. “Studied and analyzed” sounds virtuous, even holy, until the sentence reveals the outcome: intellectual procedure used as a weapon.
The subtext is a warning about power. Gatekeepers rarely say, “We fear what this might change.” They say, “We’re still evaluating.” Pollard names the way evaluation can be an alibi for delay, delay a method of control. New ideas need some oxygen: trials, partial commitments, imperfect experiments, room to be wrong without being strangled.
It also reads as a critique of a church tempted to turn faith into administration. If everything must be vetted to death, nothing living will ever make it to the pulpit, the classroom, or the street.
The intent is pastoral and political at once. In an era when Darwin, industrial capitalism, higher biblical criticism, and modern science were destabilizing inherited certainties, institutions learned a defensive reflex: treat the new as a specimen, put it under glass, and keep it from breathing in public life. Pollard frames that reflex as a kind of cowardice dressed up as diligence. “Studied and analyzed” sounds virtuous, even holy, until the sentence reveals the outcome: intellectual procedure used as a weapon.
The subtext is a warning about power. Gatekeepers rarely say, “We fear what this might change.” They say, “We’re still evaluating.” Pollard names the way evaluation can be an alibi for delay, delay a method of control. New ideas need some oxygen: trials, partial commitments, imperfect experiments, room to be wrong without being strangled.
It also reads as a critique of a church tempted to turn faith into administration. If everything must be vetted to death, nothing living will ever make it to the pulpit, the classroom, or the street.
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| Topic | Startup |
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