Quotes About Change

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

At bottom, though, Brown helped maintain a stable society by moving it forward, far less than civil rights advocates had hoped but far more than opponents felt was needed or necessary.

The goal was organized resistance to racial subjugation, and its harassing effect was probably more potent precisely because they risked so much without either economic or political power and with no certainty that they could change a system that they had known and hated all of their lives.

When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

Once you break your identification with the system, with the authoritarian technics that are driving planetary murder, your language and your actions become very different. Once you identify with the real, living planet, everything changes.

Here's another definition I like, for different reasons: "An act of violence would be any act that inflicts physical or psychological harm on another."388 I like this one because its inclusiveness reminds us of the ubiquity of violence, and thus I think demystifies violence a bit. So, you say you oppose violence? Well, in that case you oppose life. You oppose all change. The important question becomes: What types of violence do you oppose?

Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?

My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune and change my desires rather than changing how things stand in the world.

My principle has ever been to attempt to overcome myself rather than fortune and to change my desires rather than the natural order.

Everything changes in the fullness of time and everything that lies ahead of us is a mystery; even in the end of our lives we have lived, but there it will still be a closed book when it becomes life after death. -MillYentei

My God; I might as well smile today because it seems as if the red clay we have been created from "Adamah" / "mother-earth" isn't changing for the greater good. -MillYentei

It is folly alone that stays the fugue of Youth and beats off louring Old Age.

Detrás de la fachada de la ciudad moderna, sigue morando el viejo mono desnudo. Sólo los nombres han cambiado: en vez de caza, decimos "trabajo"; en vez de campo de caza, "barrio comercial", en vez de cubil, "hogar", en vez de apareamiento, "matrimonio"; en vez de compañera, "esposa", etcétera.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC's military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Refusal to accept the flow of the world is the root of all misery.

What we possess is temporary, but what we become is permanent.

The Gita does not speak of changing the world. It speaks of appreciating the world that is always changing.

human memory is short, and history always repeats itself.

The point of existence in this dynamic, ever-changing world then was not to aspire or achieve, but to introspect.