Quotes About Change

Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn't discontent the lever of change?

Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away.

Tom Joad is Steinbeck's only character to move from violently selfish immaturity to compassionate maturity without losing a naive faith or his life before the action ends.

But this tractor does two things—it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank.

But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I,'' and cuts you off forever from the "we.'' The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness

It isn't only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.

John Steinbeck

wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and a kind of decay sets in; poorer people move in as the rents fall, and small fringe businesses take the place of once flowering establishments. The district is still too good to tear down and too outmoded to be desirable.

No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time—he can never return to simplicity.

Can you imagine? said Adam. 'He'll know so many new things. I wonder if he'll talk different. You know, Lee, in the East a boy takes on the speech of his school. You can tell a Harvard man from a Princeton man. At least that's what they say.' 'I'll listen,' said Lee. 'I wonder what dialect they speak at Stanford.

Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners;

Tell 'em ya dong's growed sence you los' your eye.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. As a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cats, dogs, butterflies and people.

Why is there so much contention in our world?" Thus agitated, Morihei grabbed the tree and single-handedly moved it to its new location. Onisaburo happened to be present as well and said to Morihei, "That is the power of righteous indignation. Channel that tremendous force into the proper activity and you will accomplish wonderful things.

Woman can change better'n man,'' ''Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.

Growth is betrayal.

But cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

We shed skins in life, to keep living.

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...