Quotes About Change

Culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life.

All things are in motion, all is in process, nothing abides, nothing will ever change in this eternal moment.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break.

I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.)

Civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.

The plow of mortality drives through the stubble, turns over rocks and sod and weeds to cover the old, the worn-out, the husks, shells, empty seedpods and sapless roots, clearing the field for the next crop. A ruthless, brutal process—but clean and beautiful.

For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.

There comes a time in a man's life when he has to pull up stakes. Has to light out. Has to stop straddling, and start cutting, fence.

Shine, perishing republic.

Outnumbered, surrounded and overwhelmed, the Navajos will probably be forced in self-defense to malform themselves into the shape required by industrial econometrics. Red-skinned black men at present, they must learn to become dark-brown white men with credit cards and crew-cut sensibilities.

They won't break me. I've got a nimble and pliant will, and the powers of a chameleon. I'll conform for a year, or two years if necessary, and when I get out I'll be a wiser man. Maybe a sadder man. Possibly bitter, too—I hope not.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Every monster was a man first.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Time passes. You're not as ... recognizable now as you were.

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it."

Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.

the path to change is not through greater willpower and harder work, but rather through thinking differently.

The unchanging element is change—

Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us.

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.