Quotes About Change

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.…

in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Progress in America does not usually begin at the top and among the few, but from the bottom and among the many. It comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful.

And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country's finest hours lay ahead.

But they always stayed in the arena, grappling with each other and with Stalin to find a way to win. Had they failed, or truly fallen out with each other, we could be living in a different world.

His impulse," Winston Churchill had written of FDR in the mid-1930s, "is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land.

John Kennedy's death had changed everything. "Now I represent the whole country, and I can do what the whole country thinks is right," Johnson said. "Or ought to.

Long argued that both Democrats and Republicans had failed the country at one time or another. Power was concentrated in the hands of a self-serving financial and political elite. Only radical change, brought about by dynamic, unconventional leaders—leaders like Long—could make the nation the property of the people once more:

You never can tell what's going to happen to a man until he gets to a place of responsibility

history is a living thing that never dies.

passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.

If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming.

I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.

If you couldn't kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned for ever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: you change their minds.

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn't the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine's crime had been a badly worded joke mocking privilege. To see the catastrophe as her fault felt to me a little like 'Don't wear short skirts'. It felt like victim-blaming.

He said ... Everyone's attention span is so short. They'll be mad about something new today.

Psychopaths don't change, she [Essi Viding] said. They don't learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they'll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I figured this out. I know what's wrong with what we've done in Iraq. We've been following time as it goes forward. What a classic mistake. Linear time is so pre-9-11.

What are you so mad about? That we still have a government? We still have "traffic lights." We're sorry. The government's not perfect, but some people wish it was better, not gone.

Anything that can be proven cannot last.

America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.

Far more disturbing than any spook house at an amusement park is a ride through the old hometown if you've been away for years.

The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply what has taken you so long to learn.