Quotes About Change

The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

They are official sinners but privately repentants. At the present stage of our society even the relation between sin and repentance may have undergone a fundamental change and may be the opposite of what it used to be formerly.

Important artworks constantly divulge new layers, they age, grow cold and die.

Aufgearbeitet wäre die Vergangenheit erst dann, wenn die Ursachen des Vergangenen beseitigt wären. Nur weil die Ursachen fortbestehen, ward sein Bann bis heute nicht gebrochen.

She had longed for adventure, and now that it was happening to her, she was not sure how she felt about it.

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.

security—the feeling that nothing could change seriously for the worse, and that the life that you had was invulnerable—was illusory and even dangerous.

A healthy modern society must know how to remain the same as well as change, to conserve as well as to reform. Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

It is one thing for traditions to die out of themselves; it is quite another for them to be killed by men who think they know everything, by men whose vengeance extends even to the past, even to the dead.

The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.

The development of an image is a mysterious thing: once a public figure has been cast in a public role, it is almost impossible for him to change the character. It is as if someone has assembled personality traits into a convenient pattern, no writer ever re-examines it: it is easier to use the accepted pattern.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

When I was a lark, I sang;When I was a worm, I devoured.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

What falls away is always. And is near.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.