Quotes About Change

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist

Don't think that your first love has to be your only love.

We became a trickle that grew into a river.

I thought maybe this was the way we could show love for our country, and we should not make too much fuss or noise, we should abide by what they asked of us. I'm a totally different person now than I was back then. I was naiive about so many things.

Just as in nature good weather can't last indefinitely, so too must there always be times of trial in human lives.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreams fire has singed the edges of, they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with. Shimmering fans work against the heat & smell of gunpowder, making money float from hand to hand. The next moment a rocket pushes a white fist through night sky, & they scatter like birds & fall into the shape their lives have become.

I'm turning you into a girl chasing a butterfly, a she-wolf on a hilltop, & then back into a woman.

Life is a constant process of change with which views and values must keep up.

This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.

Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.

Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.

in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.

This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.

There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

Consistency is the playground of dull minds

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don't know.

the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.