Quotes About Change

The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William.

The fall of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced.

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress of evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the 'development' of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition.

after the Black Death, had materially changed the role of law. It was no longer an instrument of communal justice; it had instead become the machinery of exaction designed to control and discipline the lower classes.

This would be entirely consistent with a reformation that was less about the assertion of faith and principle than about the redistribution of power and wealth.

What infuriated many observers was that everything had changed and nothing had changed. That in fact seems to be the nature of English life. It was a revolution which had not changed the nature of governance.

It may be noted, in parenthesis, that in this period the coach was introduced to England

In previous times no flesh had ever been eaten on fish days; now the people of London scorned fish as a relic of papistry.

The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974.

Many of the developments that have been described as Norman in fact represented only the acceleration of English custom.

In fact, most cells of your body change every seven years and, in fact, every atom in your body changes over about once every year.

Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It's depressing if you spend too much time reliving the old joys. You think you'll never have anything as good again.

What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.

I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.

What is that thing? Vampires. Or, as it was spelled at the time, vampyres. Yes, we know: It is difficult to accept, a strain to wrap your head around. Go and take the time to do so. Watch some television programs, or read some books in which vampyres are heroic and charming and sparkle in the daylight, and then return here and brace yourself for a return to a time that vampyres were things that went bump in the night.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

The non-profit institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its product is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their product is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.

And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.

Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves. But – and this defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends.