Quotes About Change

Six years is a considerable time in human life, and if it be true that the witty remarks one makes at a dinner party seem peculiarly foolish the next morning, how much more does the enthusiasm of 1930 appear foolish in 1936.

The only way to reform modern lettering is to abolish it.

Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.

O domínio do passado não implica em uma imagem de imobilidade social. É compatível com visões cíclicas de mudança histórica, e certamente com a regressão e a catástrofe (ou seja, o fracasso em reproduzir o passado). É incompatível com a ideia de progesso contínuo.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.

in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man's reason and the boundless range of his intelligence. Never, says de Tocqueville, had humanity been prouder of itself nor had it ever so much faith in its own omnipotence.

Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo.

If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world."3

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.

The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man's reason and the boundless range of his intelligence.

On the other hand, those who reject the present and fix their eyes and hearts on things to come have a faculty for detecting the embryo of future danger or advantage in the ripeness of their times.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

The conservatism of a religion—its orthodoxy—is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. A rising religious movement is all change and experiment—open to new views and techniques from all quarters.