Quotes About Change

I do believe systemic racism is real. It's one of the main reasons I'm running for Congress.

Talking with economists, climate scientists, and psychologists convinced me that depersonalizing climate change, such that the only answers are systemic, is a mistake of its own. It misses how social change is built on a foundation of individual practice.

Canada is so far behind on issues related to systemic racism.

It is imperative that we address the barriers to access and the systemic racism that we know is contributing to our astronomically high maternal mortality rates. The onus must be on the health care system to make necessary changes.

I am disappointed my grandchildren are growing up in a country still struggling to change. But it doesn't have to be this way. They don't have to live in a country infected with systemic racism.

This pandemic has provided an opportunity to reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems, that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.

Sometimes there is no sugar-coating it. Sometimes you have to challenge people's belief systems in a progressive way.

Healthy forests and wetlands stand sentry against the dangers of climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away in plants, root systems and soil.

The power in Washington, D.C., is centered on the status quo - outdated systems, models, and programs built for a previous century. With more silicon and less concrete, we can open up those models to return power and independence to every man, woman, and child.

The shortest distance between two points is always under construction.

meliorism"—the conviction that, through the small, beneficent actions and intentions of individuals, the world might gradually grow to be a better place.

Sometimes you have to destroy the past so that you'll learn how to live in the new world.

It's just hard that moving on sometimes means leaving people behind.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.

I guess my question is: Is the new you the stranger? Or is the stranger the person you leave behind?" -Sherm

Look, I know Mom talks about the big picture. She wants you to remember that you'll find new friends, that life is always changing, sometimes in really good ways. But life is also what's happening NOW, Georges. What Dallas and Carter are doing is happening NOW, and you can't just wait for it to be over. We have to do something about it. Now.

There are days when everything changes, and this was one of those days.

When you were small, you would swing yourself up legs-first, but now you have to stick your head through the opening in the floor and then hoist the rest. You certainly have grown, you tell yourself.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

But Bridge understood that life didn't balance anymore. Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top.

The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.

Look, I know Mom talks about the big picture. She wants you to remember that you'll find new friends, that life is always changing, sometimes in really good ways. But life is also what's happening now, Georges.