It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

Land’s remark reframes innovation as an act of subtraction rather than invention. Instead of treating creativity as the constant production of novelty, it suggests that progress is often blocked by inherited assumptions—habits of thought, institutional routines, or “common sense” constraints—that persist long after their usefulness. The quote implies that breakthroughs can come from suspending default frameworks and re-seeing a problem without the mental furniture that normally organizes it. In this view, the obstacle is not a shortage of ideas but the tenacity of old ones: they narrow what seems possible, what questions get asked, and what solutions are allowed to count as realistic.