Quotes About Change

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

Two Winter Walks To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.

Solo cuando la miel se convierte en polvo quedas libre.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it;

El feminismo desea y busca cambiar todo el sistema humano; es cierto que muchos hombres ya se han unido a este proyecto, pero cómo beneficia a los hombres y de qué manera el statu quo actual también les daña son temas que merecen una reflexión más profunda.

To recognize the momentousness of what has happened is to apprehend what might happen. Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

With red-rimmed eyes and a wavering voice, he said, "I want you to know that I am sorry. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to understand this." I held the gaze of a man softened by humility, and gently said, "It's all right. You are here now. It's not too late." Change happens gradually, then suddenly. It's never too late to be part of the social movement that will help heal our world.

And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.

It's hard to say what difference we make, but we meet people who are hungry, people who bless us, and people who turn away because they're busy shooting up, or crack has taken away their appetites, or suffering has driven them mad. Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people.

Revolutions are first of all ideas.

perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?

seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.

The body is nothing more than a parcel in transit, a chess piece dropped on another square, it does not move but is moved.

the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you'll see coming back.

Buddhism takes change as a given and suffering as the inevitable consequence of attachment and then asks what you are going to do about it. Suffering, though, is not the most accurate translation of the Pali word dukkha. Dukkha means sky, ether, or hole, particularly an axle hole. Sukkha was a good axle hole for a wheel, while dukkha was a poor one, one that made the wheel wobble and bump, jolting the load. It could be translated as discord or disturbance, the antithesis of harmony or serenity.

Like a life, a journey assumes a shape and a meaning that are only clear afterward, and like a journey, a life requires that you learn to let go of the plan when the actuality departs from it, to embrace what's arriving, let go of what's departing, to move forward and not get stuck. You can cover the same ground with entirely different purposes.

What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.

They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.

when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

You don't have to subscribe to a political ideology, move to a commune, or join the guerrillas in the mountains; you wake up in a society suddenly transformed, and chances are good you will be part of that transformation in what you do, in whom you connect to, in how you feel. Something changes.