Quotes About Change

Time erodes both steel and stone.' So Ovid had written in the months before his death.

More people worship the rising than the setting sun

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else.

Just when you've squared up to the solemn realisation that life is a bitch, it turns round and does something nice, just to confuse you. - Emily Spitzer, The Better Mousetrap

Mostly I sit at home in the evenings watching the box and hoping that one day I'll evolve into plankton.

That's the problem with running away, said the little voice. No matter where you go, you have to take yourself with you; and if yourself is constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone and not worrying if the rest of the world is weirder than ferret ragout, where the hell is the point?

My dad said, 'The thing that I was told that was really helpful was that I mustn't be afraid of the things I was afraid of when I was five years old'. The shock of his childhood had put him in this defensive crouch against the world, and he needed to know that he had a nice wife and kids and it wasn't the same any more.

Repeat anything often enough and it will start to become you.

A word can change a mind, a sentence can change a life and a book can change the world.

I used to think that to make something happen in a corporation or in the army, you had to be at the higher ranks, to be a general. But you just need to start a movement.

At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.

So design your space for flexibility instead of inertia and the status quo.

One of the constants of mass psychology is that, for example, when the Huns show up, the Goths move on looking for greener pastures without any Huns. In the United States we can see this, in proto form, in California, where the population of the culturally Anglo are leaving in greater numbers than are coming in.

I guess the decay of a corpse is progress, too . . . from the point of view of the bacteria.

Als dat glorieuze continent zich blijft beroepen op zijn eeuwige waarden - waarom zouden dan ook zijn eeuwenoude kwalen niet meer gelden?

Wat is de duurtijd van een boek in tijden die zich van boeken lijken af te wenden?

De eerste is Gerard Walschap, verre vriend en trouwe fan. Schrijver van stavast, geen groot talent voor toneelteksten, des te meer voor krachtig vertellen en stevige polemiek. 'Dag mensen, dat 't welga.' Dat staat in bijna minuscule letters op zijn graf van natuurtegels. Al bij het ingaan van het eerste oorlogsjaar had hij me gewaarschuwd, onder vier ogen en in bedekte termen. 'Doe gelijk iedere Belg al eeuwen doet. Buig mee zonder te buigen.

Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past

But now there are no natives – or we're the natives.

Surplus matter. I'd forgotten all about that phrase, those classes -- even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually -- but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones; I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important.

The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.

We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)

He says that all that happens when you go far, far away is that you discover you've brought yourself along.