Quotes About Change

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars.

the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. And it's true—that will happen. But it's going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast.

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340

colonialism had never died, he used to declare, it just changed names and hired local cops.

If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those "objective functions." Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things.

we're not here to, you know, reproduce Canada, for God's sake!

If we avoid a mass extinction event in the next 20 years, that's a utopian future.

After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.

Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years.

If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real.

It is a long time ago. So many lives ago--I get them all confused, don't you?

And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story"—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

Götterdämmerung capitalism

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable

Just because the need was urgent and her case was good, that didn't mean anything would change.

God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often

Will I like it Jake? In your place? I hope so, hon. Is it very different? I smiled. People pay more for gasoline and have more buttons to push. Otherwise, it's about the same.

Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages

A man's sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

Shuddering in his efforts to repress a yawn of nervousness, he asked in his flat northern voice: How´s Margaret these days? The other´s clay-like features changed indefinably as his attention, like a squadron of slow old battleships, began wheeling to face this new phenomenon , and in a moment or two he was able to say: Margaret.

To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

Can you identify in your own life speculations that became educated guesses and then truth? Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life?