“Why are they [people] more likely to listen to people who tell them they can't make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?”

Page 169.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

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Do you have more details about the quote "Why are they [people] more likely to listen to people who tell them they can't make changes than they are to people who…" by Donella Meadows?

Donella Meadows15

American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer 1941–2001

Allan Gurganus (1947) American novelist and story writer

Variant: Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Source: Mrs. Warren's Profession & Others

“Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Patriotism, or Peace? http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism,_or_Peace%3F (1896), translated by Nathan Haskell Dole Variant: I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked. What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases, or, finally, some other conception is substituted for patriotism – something which has nothing in common with the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer so severely. Patriotism and Government http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Government (1900) Context: Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.

“What will people say?”
“Who,” I asked, “is going to tell them?”

T. A. Waters (1938–1998) American magician

Source: The Probability Pad (1970), Chapter 2 (p. 12)