Quotes About Change

However convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here.

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves, Like lightning Europe le'pt forth, Sombre, superb and terrible.

Enough - the Centenarian's story ends; The two, past and present, have interchanged; I myself, as connector, as chansonnier of a great future, am now speaking.

O LIVING always, always dying! O the burials of me past and present, O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever; O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;) O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at where I cast them, To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.

The greater the reform needed, the greater the personality you need to accomplish it.

You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me" You lingering sparse leaves of me on winter-nearing boughs, And I some well-shorn tree of field or orchard-row; You tokens diminute and lorn—(not now the flush of May, or July clover-bloom—no grain of August now;) You pallid banner-staves—you pennants valueless—you overstay'd of time, Yet my soul-dearest leaves confirming all the rest, The faithfulest—hardiest—last.

Vago en un viatge perpetu. Tot avança, progressa, res no s'esfondra.

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things from Leaves of Grass

Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes

Is this ten a touch? Quivering me to a new identity

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity

Tiap bayangan memiliki nama; Saat memikirkan semua yang kumiliki, aku gelisah, Kudengar rumor tentang kemasyhuran. Bukan untuk kebanggaan, melainkan hanya kehinaan, Bayangan berubah menjadi tulang. (Allen Ginsberg)

Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ... The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.

For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of that which really concerns him. And that is precisely why the appearance of repetition doesn't exist for him in history; because the moments in the course of history which matter most to him become moments of the present through their index as fore-history, and change their characteristics according to the catastrophic or triumphant determination of that present.

That things are status quo is the catastrophe.

Daß es so weiter geht, ist die Katastrophe. Sie ist nicht das jeweils Bevorstehende sondern das jeweils Gegebene.

It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth; the former seem carried away by a recklessness of which they are totally unaware, the latter seem possessed by a stinginess which actually is nothing but the old ingrained fear of what the next day may bring.

It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns.