Quotes About Change

But it isn't right! I mean I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it— I destroy what it is, what I love in it.

But it isn't working fast enough." He tried to compose himself. "If you took your job seriously, you'd be looking into how to make change happen faster. Some things might be against the law, but in that case the law is wrong. I think the principle was set at Nuremberg—you're wrong to obey orders that are wrong.

The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message 'This Too Will Pass.

In a storm the Flatiron appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of new America still in the making. said Alfred Steiglitz

History directing evolution.

Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them into the feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing lasted. This was the last time she would ever sit on this bench. If she came down to the corniche tomorrow and sat on this same bench, it would again be the last time, and there would again be nothing lasting about it.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.

We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.

The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We're getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we're entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other.

So now I'm popular?" Freya says. "They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?

Kim Stanley Robinson

What's the point? we asked. No more fishing. Good, we said.

Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the seventeenth century like it was supposed to.

you feel will also change—both in your body and in how you understand it as a meaning. Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken.

But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs—in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.

With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.

Kim Stanley Robinson

That's the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That's crap. The system overdetermines everything, and it's the system that has to change.

Events would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; 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; and how much more so now.

Of course I am old now, but there is no changing that, except by death. At least I have this day, and these days.

One-eight-billionth wasn't a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn't entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.