Quotes About Change

The genius of our brain's construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn't.

it has become almost impossible for us to imagine what life was like before electricity began to flow through the sockets in our walls.

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the "huge industry simply melted away.

our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski

What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

All technological change is generational change.

concordances. But here, too, the effects are different. As

What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.

It was Calzas who told me that your life is a road along which you leave many markers - points in time and places on the map. The ones in time you can only revisit in your mind, and they never change. The places can be revisited firsthand, but they're constantly changing. To keep a place the same, he said, you can no longer return to it - and then it becomes a point in time.

You don't need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.

This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking.

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do something for our children'.

The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

High-protein diets can cause elevated levels of aggression, especially territorial aggression such as Bailey was showing. So Jack and Sarah needed to change Bailey's diet.

Maybe that's nature's way. Making people you once loved less lovable, so that it won't be so hard when they go.

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Well, this may have once been a ham, but now it is nothing but an ex-ham.

If markets change then so must brands.

Educated middle-class people such as the young Adolf Berle had been raised on the idea that American civilization was at heart one of small-town merchants and independent farmers. Now

Almost everything is tuned to keeping the status quo shuffling along. When your life really takes off, some of your friends are very likely to perceive this as a threat because you, not they, are stepping out into a new future. They will cajole you to keep within conventional bounds, to be reasonable, to do the "right" thing.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

It happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you've known forever don't see things the way you do. So you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on.