Quotes About Change

Success nullifies. You then have to do it again, preferably differently

There is nothing worse than bringing up the 'good old days.' To me, that's the ultimate acknowledgment of failure.

Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist

No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind

In 1642 the modern world was born.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

A silent, unavoidable revolution is taking place in society, a revolution THAT CARES AS LITTLE ABOUT THE HUMAN LIVES IT DESTROYS as an earthquake cares about the houses it ravages. Classes and RACES THAT ARE TOO WEAK to dominate the new conditions of existence WILL BE DEFEATED.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.

The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.

This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognise it by means of another interpretation....They forget however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.

Nous ne nous présentons pas au monde en doctrinaires avec un nouveau principe en lui disant: voici la vérité, c'est ici qu'il faut tomber à genoux. Des principes du monde nous tirons pour le monde des principes nouveaux.

The disappearance of this non-capitalist (pre-capitalist) environment thus marks the absolute limit of capitalist development.

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx, 1963)

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

T]he various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards.

They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.