Quotes About Change

You can't really move forward until you look back. [From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.

Surely in the case of Aristotle the immutability of the divine being was due to its emptiness and internal immobility. No greater contrast is thinkable between the unmoved noesis noeeseoos of Aristotle and the Christian God. This appears particularly from the fact that the Bible does not hesitate to attribute all manner of activity to God...Herein lies the glory of the Christian doctrine of God, that the unchangeable one is in control of the change of the universe.

It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he's missing a lot by being like this - fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is he lost it all, and what there is - if anything - ever to bring it back. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

How often it is a small, almost unconscious event that makes a turning point.

To Tanta Yanns the clothes in fashion when she was young represented God's final say on human apparel. All change since then came from the style book of the devil.

How often it is a small, almost unconscious event that marks a turning point.

Conditions are always changing; therefore, I must not be dependent upon conditions. What matters supremely is my soul and my relationship to God.

El absurdo es que no parezca un absurdo -dijo sibilinamente Oliveira-. El absurdo es que salgas por la mañana a la puerta y encuentres la botella de leche en el umbral y te quedes tan tranquilo porque ayer te pasó lo mismo y mañana te volverá a pasar. Es ese estancamiento, ese así sea, esa sospechosa carencia de excepciones. Yo no sé, che, habría que intentar otro camino.

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.

Time flies when you're falling down"...(not from a book, it's a lyric)

So it's not what you thought it was going to be—that doesn't mean it can't still be something amazing.

There's no expiration date on second chances.

You don't have to let the past write your future.

People don't always let us become who we are. They try to keep us in the box of who we were.

Not every shift in understanding is good, since we make good and bad decisions, but we can never learn without being open to change in our thinking.

I think politics is too important to be left to politicians.

The past is a foreign country -- and increasingly I don't want to visit.

It's funny how most activists are pacifists.

It's funny how social activists usually protest against the only things that have a credible chance of achieving the activists' goals.

what's done is done", that the past cannot be changed, and that the future can be changed because it is "open". To