Quotes About Change

How easy it is to upend your life. To restless, heedless me it was nothing.

For me, this wasn't a big leap—our fleeing known New York for the uncertainty of life in Europe was within the continuum of leaps I had been making my entire life.

was the intimation that fresh pastures beckoned. Jansch's Jack Orion

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; "That's where I'm needed," he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. "I just happened to be there," he was to say. "There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.

It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

Live and learn, or you don't live long.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. Logic proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

It would take centuries and he must grow and grow and grow, but he was in no hurry--he grokked that Eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing Now were identical.

Robert A. Heinlein

Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort.

Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

The people will take a certain amount of reform, then they want a rest. But the reforms stay.

Time was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don't get tougher; I get softer.

But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything that didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

Revolution is an amateur thing for almost everybody;

Robert A. Heinlein

But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.

Nope. Gadflies such as yourself are utterly necessary. Nor am I opposed to 'turning the rascals out'—it's usually the soundest rule of politics. But it's well to take a look at what new rascals you are going to get before you jump at any chance to turn your present rascals out.

That's what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.