Quotes About Change

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions. But here's the truth: this despair isn't just self-defeating; I think it's actually empirically wrong. I reminded myself - forces as powerful as the tech companies have been defeated many times in human history, and it always happens in the same way. It is when ordinary people form movements and demand something better, and they don't give up until they have achieved it.

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.

The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable - until it changes, and then we realise it didn't have to be like that in the first place.

you don't need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems [are], and know about creative confrontation—to create drama around it, to begin the consciousness-raising…. You capture people's attention, and then enough people feel that it's a vital issue that they want to give their time and their energy [to], and that there's a clear direction.

it has to begin with a bit of introspection, with a bit of understanding ourselves." Yes, he says, the environment changed: "You [the average tech user] didn't make the iPhone. It's not your fault. I never said it's your fault. I'm saying it's your responsibility. This stuff isn't going away. In some form or other, it's here to stay. What choice do we have? We have to adapt. That's our only option.

Irving didn't want this to be true—it contradicted his own published work—but he told me, "One thing I do pride myself on is looking at the data, and allowing my mind to be changed when the data's different than I expected.

If there isn't a group doing what you believe needs to be done, set it up and email me at [email protected], and I'll add it to the book's website and to future editions of this book.

Now that they knew there were addicts at the meetings and that helping them to survive was now an official duty, the city bureaucrats started to talk differently.

We are not imprisoned in the values that have been making us feel so lousy for so long. By coming together with what really matters, we can begin to dig a tunnel back to meaningful values.

Cruel optimism takes it for granted that we can't significantly change the systems that are wrecking our attention, so we have to mainly focus on changing our isolated selves. But why should we accept these systems as a given?

He had a sense that the deterioration he was experiencing in his focus was happening to a lot of the people around him – but he also knew that at many points in history, people have thought they were experiencing some kind of disastrous social decline, when in fact, they were merely ageing. It's always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.

Nada tiene que quedarse como está. Si un dogma no funciona, por muy fuerte e inamovible que parezca, siempre puede uno desecharlo y plantear algo distinto.

Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.

The alternative to cruel optimism - telling people a simplistic story that sets them up to fail - isn't pessimism, the idea that you can't change anything. It's authentic optimism. This is where you honestly acknowledge the barriers that stand in the way of your goal and establish a plan to work together with other people to dismantle those barriers, step by step.

Once the financial incentives are changed - through subscription, or public ownership, or another model - then the nature of these sites can change, in ways we can actually begin to envision already. Aza [Raskin] told me that 'it's actually technically not hard' to redesign the major social-media sites so that, instead of trashing your attention span and our societies, they world be designed to heal them

It fascinated me that you could change behavior so dramatically by changing brain chemistry….

We could have looked instead at what does work: changing the environment in specific ways.

the writer Neale Donald Walsch wrote: "Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.

But that's the thing about the pessimistic belief that we are powerless and we can't change anything. It's false.

this change has caused another transformation—in how people see the police. "I don't think [people in poor neighborhoods] see the police now as enemies.

The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through "the Great Acceleration," and like Sune, he argues it's not simply our tech that's getting faster—it's almost everything. There's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities.

James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

Character develops itself in the stream of life.