Quotes About Change

By the time you've figured out how the world works, you've already lost about everything you've hope to keep.

Those who make us believe that anything's possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don't, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change.

Even in a seemingly futile moment or losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who could go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Mandela called this process "the multiplication of courage.

There are risks and costs to a program of action but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

The world rolls: the circumstances vary every hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee.

the one thing to which the human spirit could always accommodate itself was chaos and misfortune.

I walk home, thinking of another place, of seemingly long endless summers and the shade of different kinds of trees; and then of winters when the branches of the trees were bare, so bare that, recalling them now, it seems inconceivable to me that I looked at them and did not think of the summer just gone, and the spring soon to come, as illusions; as dreams, never fulfilled, never to be fulfilled.' Philoctetes.

He was twenty-five but had that elongated bony English look of not yet having completed the process of growing-up and filling out which meant in a few years he would suddenly appear middle-aged as well as beefy because to men like this everything seemed to happen at once round about the age of thirty; everything except white hair which was reserved for retirement and was equally sudden and the only sign that old age had arrived.

the past had other possibilities, and so do we today.

The emergence of any knowledge system is always linked with a shift in power.

He insisted they were there to help. The reason they reached out to the boys was that they are young and open-minded. "It is the youth who will make the changes necessary to ensure human survival. You can decide to continue or end this experience. If you choose to continue, we will meet again." He walked them to the door and said goodbye.

A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves.

One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South." What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.

Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near.

Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to --- they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence...

A viagem é muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguível de vivermos a nossa vida.

I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.

There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather, a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past.

to rid the people of their old beliefs and insert new ones.

Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This - London - was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was still yet unsure of my lines.

Paul Theroux

His Congo Diary is a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on a hillside," Joyce writes in Ulysses. "For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.

a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa, at a time when I was a schoolteacher in the African bush.