Quotes About Change

What Is to Be Done?, which made the Marxist theory of revolution into a theory of how to make a revolution.

In the closing period of the World War, according to Trotsky, it took Lenin a full year to secure agreement to his proposal to change the official name of the party from "Social Democratic" to "Communist" as a means of making an organizational break with Social Democratic Marxism on an international scale.[67

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

eighteen-forties and fifties

Russian Jacobinism.

Since then the Revolution had gone through a first period of utter isolation and a second period of open war with the Entente, and now had entered a third period of being not only recognized abroad but even a little feared.

Ulyanov moved to Petersburg in 1893,

The First Decade

In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.

Societies progress by the free assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism....The whole approach of an authoritarian society is anti-rational. A rational and scientific approach requires societies to be open and pluralistic."—Karl Popper

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

Even a dry well may freshen.

The rattle of plates and cutlery was the sound of empires falling.

Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

He opened his eyes and the irises were newly discolored, as if their pale uniform blue had been spattered with gold paint. He looked at her directly and he smiled.

By the time she reached her apartment in Clear Lake

No, not sure. But willing. Willing, finally, to lose what might be lost, willing to embrace what might be gained.

If the world doesn't come to an end in the next thirty or forty years,' he said, 'we may be facing disaster.

The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

Brian took her hand a final time, then turned and walked away. Lise sat at the table a while longer. The cooling air from the patio was pleasant. The stars were coming out. Mahmud poured coffee from a silver carafe. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover. "I'm sorry—did you say something?" "I said, it's getting dark." Mahmud smiled. "It's these sunsets. Seems like they go on forever.

She had made it clear, as had Damian, that although the marriage solemnized a real commitment, it didn't mean she and I were finished. But we saw each other far less often than we once had. And to be honest, I was a little uncomfortable about sleeping with a married woman. Not because the relationship was immoral but because it was brutally asymmetrical.

As I live I must die daily My old nature I must kill

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527