Quotes About Change

Diversion Books eNewsletter

There were battles on many fronts: civil rights, sexual freedom, Vietnam, drugs. Even clothes, hair, and music were under attack by the Establishment. Unbelievable when you think about it—fucking haircuts.

How had a royal son of s'Ffalenn come by the abuse so cruelly marked into youthful flesh? The sight was an offence. Dascen Elur must have changed drastically in the years since the Fellowship sealed the Worldsend Gate for the cause of Athera's drowned sunlight.

It's amazing how a certain time in your life can seem to be a prelude, but when you look back, you realize it was a whole work, with a beginning, middle, and end.

But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.

It's neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don't need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.

half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of wilful blindness.

The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. "Modern" conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history; all human societies have been traditional for far longer than any society has been modern.

small changes at a lower level of organization can lead to emergent changes at a higher level. A typical example is the effect of that one truck driver's braking response, in Hitler's nearly fatal traffic accident of 1930, on the lives of a hundred million people who were killed or wounded in World War II.

Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe's most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.

The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents.

Jared Diamond

That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started.

don't know whether Pertamina policies have changed since then.

What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society?

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

From all that experience, Icelanders took away the conclusion: This is not a country in which we can enjoy the luxury of experimenting. We live in a fragile land; we know that our ways will allow at least some of us to survive; don't ask us to change.

Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings

Thus, it is untrue that there are continents whose societies have tended to be innovative and continents whose societies have tended to be conservative. On any continent, at any given time, there are innovative societies and also conservative ones. In addition, receptivity to innovation fluctuates in time within the same region.

Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. So

climate. Perhaps

shared among all of those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one's current approach to life isn't working, and that one has to find a new approach.

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?