Quotes About Change

What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Astérix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to afficher erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper.

Chekhov, knowing the weight of his own country's history of serfdom, spoke of how Russians must squeeze the slave out of themselves, drop by drop. Russia's continuing troubles show how long and hard a task this is.

Affonso tried to do something as difficult in his time as in ours: to be a selective modernizer. He

When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years. Affonso's life spanned a crucial period. When he was born, no one in the kingdom knew that Europeans existed.

a constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change—we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.

but also thought of everything, invented everything and changed everything.

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

Books don't change lives... People change lives... Sometimes, if you're lucky, if you get the thing right, a book can say some important things and that's all fine and good... but a book is just an artifact... a thing that sits on a desk or a shelf... People make the real difference... People and love...

When by an increase in the effectual demand, the market price of some particular commodity happens to rise a good deal above the natural price, those who employ their stocks in supplying that market are generally careful to conceal this change.

Time takes life away and gives us memory...

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any constraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any restraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

no conspiracy can survive exponential growth.

Age hasn't matured you. It's made those traits that were ticks in the twenty-five-year-old into full-blown affectations in the thirty-eight-year-old.

Enza thought no place on earth could be colder than the Italian Alps, but now she knew she just had never been to Minnesota.

All your life you was one thing. And now you can be something else if you want! Somebody completely different. You can actually start yourself over from scratch. Turn yourself into what you have always wanted to be!

Aprendi que viajar ainda é a melhor forma de alterar a vida, mudar as ideias e abraçar a inspiração, mas devemos estar de olhos bem abertos e ansiosos por agarrá-la, ou é um desperdício.

For young fellows like them, the war was a chance to become men, to see the world and save it and return home as American citizens. It didn't occur to either of them that lives would be lost, that the world they were to defend would shift under their feet and never be the same again. They only dreamed of the adventure.

And now I'm old. That bus is parked permanently. The battery is dead. And I can't remember where I put the jumper cables.

How fragile love is. How delicate and small in its first buds, when it's just an idea, a wish filled with hope. It is so easy to turn away from it entirely and choose to live alone in your own private fear. I had one moment of courage, and it changed my life. I didn't turn to love out of loneliness. Or out of habit. I let love change me.

Sometimes redemption lands in your life like a bird and looks you straight in the eye, even when you believe you don't deserve forgiveness.

A long time ago I went to a fortuneteller, and she told me that when you have a dream come true, you must then re-dream. You must not stay in the past, because all of life changes anyway, and if you try to hang on to happiness, or success, or even the people in your life, you will be unhappy. You have to set new goals.

She learned that time could not be the measurement for the things that lasted. Sometimes what endured was that which changed us in a matter of moments, not years.

When you find your purpose in life, it changes you. You see things differently. More clearly. You love more and better. You solve problems and are able to help others solve theirs because you stand in strength.