Grace Hopper — "The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'"
The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'
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More from Grace Hopper
"You manage things; you lead people."
"I've always been a little bit of a rebel."
"The greatest danger is not in failure, but in succeeding too easily."
"I've always been more interested in the future than in the past."
"The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people."
Details
Often used in speeches and interviews to advocate for innovation and against resistance to change.
Date: Late 20th century (often cited in articles from the 1980s)
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Blind adherence to tradition — continuing practices simply because they've always existed — is the greatest obstacle to progress in any organization or field. This mindset shuts down innovation before it starts, substituting habit for reasoning. When people justify decisions with 'that's how it's done,' they're choosing comfort over improvement. True advancement demands questioning inherited methods and being willing to replace them when better options exist, regardless of how deeply embedded those methods are.
Relevance to Grace Hopper
Hopper built the first compiler in 1952 after colleagues insisted computers could only process numbers, not English-like instructions. She pioneered COBOL when the industry resisted business-language programming as impractical. As a Navy mathematician who entered computing when no formal discipline existed, she spent decades dismantling inherited assumptions — about what machines could do, who could program them, and how software should be written. Her entire career was a living argument against 'we've always done it this way.'
The era
Hopper's most active decades — the 1940s through 1980s — coincided with computing's transformation from classified military hardware to commercial and personal technology. Entrenched institutions, including the Navy, IBM, and academia, repeatedly dismissed revolutionary approaches as unnecessary departures from proven methods. The Cold War accelerated computing but also hardened bureaucratic resistance to change. Each decade brought radical new possibilities — transistors, minicomputers, microprocessors — that only those willing to abandon prior assumptions could fully harness.
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