‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’.
Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.
This is because the definition of 'unreasonable' is relative. For Edison, wasting thousands of hours of lightbulb experiment was quite reasonable.
For most people before him, it was squarely in the unreasonable territory, and hence it took Edison for lightbulb to happen.
https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-ligh...
did they?
I think that in history those that caused quite a lot of damage to the World are those that laughed at unreasonable men, thinking they could not achieve anything substantial.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead or wearing toothbrush moustache, is purely coincidental
And I wouldn't disagree with that as an abstraction, but being in direct contact/proximity with him is an utterly dreadful form of masochism.
He doesn't care, and likely has never given a single iota of thought to it, as he assumes what is best is to think like him.
And dear RMS acolytes who will almost certainly bristle at this statement; I spent enough time around him and his satellites in the 90s/oughts, to feel quite comfortable saying this. He has near zero interest (and I would argue the capacity) to try to understand what drives other people, just the self-righteous purity of his own views.