Quotes About Change

Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and it seems nothing has changed.

So you turn from your independence and all the ways you either charge at life or shrink from it; this may be one of the most basic and the most crucial ways you repent.

Somehow, somewhere between our youth and yesterday, efficiency has taken the place of adventure.

We live in a very different moment in the story than David and his colleagues; a great deal has changed since the Psalms were penned. The incarnation, for one thing—the Son of God has come. Your ransom, for another. The cross has happened, the resurrection too. Tectonic shifts have shaken the heavens and the earth, and those events change the posture of our praying in profound ways.

It is not only the unit vote for the Presidency we are talking about, but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And however undramatic the pursuit of peace, that pursuit must go on. [Address before the United Nations, September 20 1963]

If not us, who? If not now, when?

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days . . .nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.

Time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

Today our concern must be with the future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.

In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. (20 January 1961).

One man can make a difference and every man should try.

People need change now, today. Even one more child dying from hunger, one more life blighted by poverty, is one too many.

because in the Dissolving, the fire should be light always, in the Sublimation mean, in the Coagulation temperate, continual in the Whitening, and strong in the Rubification.

One man can make a difference and everyone should try

We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.