Quotes About Change

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

In order to really see the world, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.

Variations in Ianguage, which at first appear to support the skeptic, are ultimately the proof of its meaning, since words would not change in meaning unless they were trying to say something.

We are entirely enclosed in our time and institutions, we can fight against it only with it, indirectly, from the inside.

All observation is already an intervention. One cannot experiment or observe without changing something in the subject of inquiry.

True development, true maturation, consists in a double phenomenon of both surpassing and maintaining the past. To truly surpass the past is also to conserve it; in becoming something more, one must not refuse to affirm what one has been.

Circularity--a dangerous word. Circularity of Heraclitus, yes: to go in one direction is truly to go in the other. A thick identity there, which truly contains difference.

We see reappearing in the revolution the very struggles it was meant to move beyond.

There is a sort of maleficence in history: it solicits men, tempts them so that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks, and events change and prove that there was another possibility. The men whom history abandons in this way and who see themselves simply as accomplices suddenly find themselves the instigators of a crime to which history has inspired them. And they are unable to look for excuses or to excuse themselves from even a part of the responsibility.

We must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: when an attitude toward the world has been confirmed often enough, it becomes privileged for us...After having built my life upon an inferiority complex, continuously reinforced for twenty years, it is not likely that I would change.

Marxism, rather than an affirmation of a future that is necessary, is much more a judgment of the present as contradictory and intolerable.

Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them.

History, then, is neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but rather the unique movement that both creates forms and shatters them.

Human existence is the change of contingency into necessity through the act of taking up. All that we are, we are on the basis of a factual situation that we make our own and that we ceaselessly transform through a sort of escape which is never an unconditioned freedom.

Man must realize his mechanicalness before he can change... Work is a question of increasing one's consciousness, not imitating virtues like monkeys.

To change one's life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one's reactions.

I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be.

I hate those e-books. They can not be the future... they may well be... I will be dead.

F**k them is what I say. I hate those ebooks. They can not be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won't give a s**t.

A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.

job losses generate should be mostly directed at technological change, not immigration

Since the baby boomer generation, the middle-income group has grown smaller with each successive generation

The average lifetime of a company on the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index has declined from sixty years to a mere ten years

To get what you want, stop doing what isn't working. - Earl Warren