Quotes About Change

How I changed my mind about women in leadership came through the gradual piling up of anomalies against a powerful but unsustainable paradigm.

It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter.

After years of operating in a top-down manner that emphasizes control and conformance, organizations are rife with obstacles to bottom-up ideas that front-line staff are forced to overcome.

AFTER YEARS OF BEING ASKED to do more with less, managers are increasingly aware that they cannot produce the results that are expected of them with the organizations they currently have and the methods they currently use.

Them as can't bend, like as not they break.

You and I and everyone else are a bit like turtles: we only make progress when we stick our necks out a little.

Livin' out here has changed a lot of things. Suspend the conventions of eastern life. That's probably why you like it so much, Hank. Women plowing land and pannin' for gold. Men sewin' up their own britches, cookin' for themselves. That's well an' find. It's good for the people an' good for the country. But too much? No, sir. Without women an' marriage, wed' all be shot or drunk ourselves to death or died of the clap. No, sir. - Prentice Ritter

Maybe, Reshmina thought, they wouldn't fight at all. Maybe they would spend their time doing something else instead, like building factories and schools and hospitals.

I hope you'll listen to what they have to say and think about how you can make a difference for the future. Because we're all together on this island we call Earth, and we're the only ones who can save it. Thank you!

innovation is all about being distracted —distracted from the way we normally think about things.

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. — ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

It is only when the people of God as a whole are activated in a movement that real world transformation takes place.

A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension. —Oliver Wendell Holmes

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there. —H. Richard Niebuhr

the church (the ecclesia), when true to its real calling, when it is on about what God is on about, is by far and away the most potent force for transformational change the world has ever seen.

Wright contended that after Martha died, "Captain Ross was so overcome with grief, he left the familiar scenes and went with his nephew, John B. Conger, through the then wild Indian country to Mobile, where he took a boat for the North. He

There were other sorts of Christmases besides the one he had made a habit of. And it might do him good to have a change, to see how it was with other people.

He glanced curiously at the men who fed the lusting blades. They could not but be changed, he thought, they must partake of that feeling to some extent: become potential destroyers, or self-destroyers.

One man's constant is another man's variable.

Unless, as leaders, we are willing to enter this in-between space that disrupts our settled assumptions and threatens our formulas and expectations, we will remain locked into a monologue of church questions and strategies.

Just as one will not get far on the road to happiness by predefining the characteristics of happiness and then going to look for them, we will not grasp what it means to be the church in our time by beginning with church questions, even if they are questions about the church's health, effectiveness, or its natural development!

Over the past twenty-five years much has been written about the need for the church to change; however, if we are to hear what God might be doing in the massively shifting contexts in which we live, we must move beyond conversations about the church, about how to make it work, and about patterns for success. I find most of these conversations are really seeking to restore the church to some imagined place in culture.

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.