Quotes About Change

Throw Them All Out

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

You have to catch people making mistakes and make it so that it's cool. You have to make it undesirable to play it safe.

When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not.

Cutting out meat would do more to help combat climate change than any other action we could feasibly take in the next 20 years.

We need to get over our reluctance to speak openly about the good we do. Silent giving will not change a culture that deems it sensible to spend all your money on yourself and your family, rather than to help those in greater need—even though helping others is likely to bring more fulfillment in the long run.

The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.

If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government

Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.

This revised edition is also for all of you who have changed your lives in order to bring Animal Liberation closer. You have made it possible to believe that the power of ethical reasoning can prevail over the self-interest of our species.

Climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

If the foundations of an ideological position are knocked out from under it, new foundations will be found, or else the ideological position will just hang there, defying the logical equivalent of the laws of gravity.

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.

He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby...He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving.

She thought it was too bad it didn't work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years. But

it didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened.

Home. But this isn't home. May it become so.

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept. A friend passing by saw him and asked, "Narcissus, why do you weep?" "Because my face has changed," Narcissus said. "Do you cry because you grow older?" "No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence.

people who thought he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later.

You all know what's been happening to us. We sit around here and talk like a bunch of ghouls. Milly can hardly stand having us in my house anymore. We weren't always like this – we used to talk about all sorts of things. We used to have fun – there used to be fun. Now there isn't. We're all scared. But I don't know if some of you are admitting it. Well, it's been a year, and I don't mind saying that I am.

If the owners are cashing out, there's no reason for you to be cashing in.

Because language and society are so closely linked, it is possible, in some cases, to encourage social change by directing attention towards linguistic reflections of aspects of society that one would like to see altered.

For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture, human societies had very effective social norms and institutions for controlling bullies. Why would they suddenly (in a few thousand years) replace them with institutions that gave the upstarts legitimacy?