Quotes About Change

had yet to influence

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.

Once, a preacher joined a postal carrier making his rounds in No Man's Land. The sky turned black and lightning flashed. Bolts struck the ground and electrified barbed-wire fences. The preacher cowered for cover. The carrier told him to relax. "God isn't that awful," he said. "Lightning will never strike a mailman or a preacher." Within ten years, God would change moods.

the Klan had "changed its bed sheets for a policeman's uniform.

The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

In the summer of 1935, FDR launched the Second Hundred Days, one of the great thrusts of domestic change ever seen—zero to sixty in an eyeblink, by government time. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act to ensure that the pensionless elderly would not starve, started the Works Progress Administration to keep the government payroll rolling, and backed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined union rights in the workplace. The

That's what the suitcase farmers were doing. Salesmen, druggists, barkeeps, docs, mechanics, teachers—the range of day-jobbers who thought they wanted to be wheat farmers, ripping up a half-section here and there, trying to hit a crop—they were getting out before they got in any deeper.

Nearly seven in ten Americans are still Christian. But if White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were indeed the rootstock of the United States, then the mother ground is nearly barren. What's happening is a mass exodus, particularly among the young: 71 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-four say they have no religion.

Ideas take on their own trajectory, but they die without people to carry them into the corridors of power.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Many a false step was made by standing still.

I'll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists

Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending.

You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It's that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.

You must want to be a butterfly so badly, you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." –Anaïs Nin

most people spend most of their time on defense, in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they got instead of moving to a different table with different cards. Instead

In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It's that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.

everything changes. Snow becomes water. It's beautiful because it changes. Things are fleeting. It felt so beautiful to be part of this weird world in that moment. I felt part of the world again, rather than removed from it. It

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As

Seeing progress in changing numbers makes the repetitive fascinating and creates a positive feedback loop. Once again, the act of measuring is often more important than what you measure. To quote the industrial statistician George Box: "Every model is wrong, but some are useful.