Quotes About Change

At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.

Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died;

Bold didn't know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.

for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said. What do you mean? Games don't mean anything. Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me. John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.

Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise

Mass demonstration and insurrection are the only things that will beat them, history shows this.

was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people's souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind.

This perpetual rise and fall now got measured to an obsessive-compulsive degree, understandable given the traumas of the last century and the distinct possibility of future traumas. Sea level had for the most part stabilized after the Second Pulse, but there was still a lot of Antarctic ice teetering on the brink, so past performance was no guarantee of future anything.

twenty million years.

I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort." —The Dalai Lama

The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France.

nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth

Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.

And yet we do sometimes see demonstrations, sometimes quite large ones. Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries. Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming.

We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.

Indeed, if ever you are asked to choose between fixists and mobilists, as the two sides were called during the plate-tectonics controversy—or between the stabilists and the dynamicists in the current Sirius debate—always choose the dynamicists. History is on your side.

But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages

Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn't obvious how to do it.

Art should be used to change things.

But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human's reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

It's not as if she needs the torch anymore, the welcome beacon to immigrants having been long since snuffed out. Probably