Quotes About Change

What is 'healthy' for one dominant ego-image at a particular stage of life may be decidedly unhealthy for the nascent ego-image of the next stage of life.

Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.

Bob] Dylan said, "I don't have to B.S. anybody like those guys up on Broadway that're always writin' about 'I'm hot for you and you're hot for me--ooka dooka dicka dee.' There's other things in the world besides love and sex that're important too. People shouldn't turn their backs on 'em just because they ain't pretty to look at. How is the world ever gonna get any better if we're afraid to look at these things.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.

Alexander Dow, his boss at Edison, who thought him immensely talented, tried to dissuade him. "Electricity, yes," Dow told Ford. "That's the coming thing. But gas—no.

his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not

Mr. Ford, here is our new plant," Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly. "Where is the water?" the old man asked. "There isn't any water," Lord Perry replied. "Well, let's get out of here," Ford said. "I don't even want to look at it." That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site.

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.

Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life.

ingenue whose career was winding down

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

With the whole world in economic recession, a new approach was called for.

Volcker, Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xaioping all took minority arguments that had long been in circulation and made them majoritarian (though in no case without a protracted struggle).

It was necessary to invent history in order to invent the future. The sense of necessity in Cromwell and Lenin (and even in Jefferson) springs from an obsession with time, change, an obsession with cause and effect that starts to make the effect seem like the cause of its own cause. The future is the cause of the past, and we play antiquarian games to reassure ourselves that the past is past and different so that we can believe that the future will be different too.

Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln was troubled by what he perceived as the rapid rate of change in American life. Canals and railroads were bringing about a transportation revolution; the population was swiftly spreading across the continent; immigration was beginning to seem a threat to American social cohesion; sectionalism was becoming ever more divisive as the controversy over slavery mounted; the political battles of the Jackson era had destroyed the national political consensus.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

You were a laugh with some potential. Now you're but a pricey pain.

Autumn Begins Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen, and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder, summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still. At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers. We

Facing Snow Thin slice of ascending light, radiant arc Tipped aside bellied dark- the first moon Appears, and barely risen beyond ancient Frontier passes, edges into clouds. Silver, Changeless, the Star River spreads across Mountains empty in their own cold. Lucent Frost dusts the courtyard, chrysanthemum Blossoms clotted there with solemn dark. Tu Fu

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'

In my old age, I'll be in L.A.