Quotes About Change

To the Jews the age of 13 (the Sumerian unit of 12 plus 1) marks the threshold of adulthood. It is curious how significant multiples of 13 are in the individual's life. At 2 x 13 the mind catches up with the body. 3 x 13 marks the beginning of a change of life. At 4 x 13 creative people catch their second breath. 5 x 13 is the age of retirement, and 6 x 13 most often marks the end of life.

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves.

they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world.

It is well for those who hug the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march.

The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, and we find him among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The

There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.

It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.

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

Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure and frustration. Freedom alleviates frustration by making available the palliatives of action, movement, change and protest.

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action. It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require. When the same person or persons (or the same type of person) leads a movement from its inception to maturity, it usually ends in disaster.

The danger of the fanatic to the development of a movement is that he cannot settle down. Once victory has been won and the new order begins to crystallize, the fanatic becomes an element of strain and disruption.

Another English revolution by the rich occurred at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the Industrial Revolution. The breathtaking potentialities of mechanization set the minds of manufacturers and merchants on fire. They began a revolution "as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians,"8 and in a relatively short time these respectable, Godfearing citizens changed the face of England beyond recognition. When

The man of action saves the movement from the suicidal dissensions and the recklessness of the fanatics. But his appearance usually marks the end of the dynamic phase of the movement. The war with the present is over. The genuine man of action is intent not on renovating the world but on possessing it. Whereas the life breath of the dynamic phase was protest and a desire for drastic change, the final phase is chiefly preoccupied with administering and perpetuating the power won.

new poor coming from a ruined middle class formed the chief support of the Nazi and Fascist revolutions.

The discarded and rejected are often the raw material of a nation's future. The stone the builders reject becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.

In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols.

El mundo del tercer milenio seguirá siendo, muy probablemente, un mundo de violencia política y de cambios políticos violentos. Lo único que resulta inseguro es hacia dónde llevarán

No sabemos a dónde vamos, sino tan sólo que la historia nos ha llevado hasta este punto y -si los lectores comparten el planteamiento de este libro- por qué. Sin embargo, una cosa está clara: si la humanidad ha de tener un futuro, no será prolongando el pasado o el presente. Si intentamos construir el tercer milenio sobre estas bases, fracasaremos. Y el precio del fracaso, esto es, la alternativa a una sociedad transformada, es la oscuridad

It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the 'invention of tradition' so interesting for historians of the past two centuries.

we shed the skins of who we used to be!

we all go through changes in search of self!

Losing your job is like having your identity stolen, like having what defined you run through a paper shredder. After a while the despair gets you, and it gets you good.

Sometimes you have to let people change and grow on their own, you have to back off and hope it turns out for the best.

We all give up part of ourselves to be with anyone. Relationships change our trajectories.