Quotes About Change

It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.

Why could I not have been born a hundred years ago? I used to ask myself. Somewhere about the time of the Wars of Liberation, when a man was still of some value even though he had no 'business.

On the whole earth there's no being, no substance, and probably no human institution that doesn't end by growing old. But it's in the logic of things that every human institution should be convinced of its everlastingness—unless it already carries the seed of its downfall. The hardest steel grows weary. Just as it is certain that one day the earth will disappear, so it is certain that the works of men will be overthrown.

To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have men such as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.

One has good grounds to be suspicious of any new idea, any doctrine, any new worldview, or any political or economical movement, that tries to deny everything that the past has produced, or to present it as inferior and worthless... Any renovation that's truly beneficial to human progress will always have to begin its constructive work where the last stones have been laid.

My ideas about anti-Semitism also changed in the course of time, and this was my most difficult transformation... It cost me a great internal struggle, and it was only after a long battle between reason and sentiment that the former emerged victorious. Two years later, sentiment rallied to the side of reason and became its faithful guardian and advisor.

Whoever will not be a hammer in history, will be an anvil.

I am of the opinion that there is nothing which has been produced by the will of man which cannot in its turn be altered by another human will.

Art is something that must be overcome.

I'm at that place I grew up to leave.

And realize that maybe they came into your life, not to be there forever, but to teach you something that will make you ready when forever finds you.

I go by Kit now… and, just so you know, Katie wants to be called Kat." Jesus Christ. Give me a break…

Evolution must have your choice,choose joy.

People threw their elderly relatives into the snow and granny flats became dining rooms, while they tied up miniature vegetables and sprayed raspberry vinegar like tomcats on the pull.

A spirit of practicality had come to her aid. It was only human. When the earthquake stops, when the flood recedes, when the volcanic dust settles or the guns fall silent, the survivors pick their way through the rubble and debris and wreckage. A chair leg here, a first communion certificate or a bundle of love letters there. The flotsam and jetsam of the old ways?the ways that will never return.

in contrast to Europe, where between 1894 and 1914 five heads of state, three prime ministers, and one president were assassinated.

I believe in taking risks and trying new things, both in my personal life and in my career.

My state of being. Well, I'd gone from pissed off, lonely, sad, frightened, and depressed, to being a little wiser, a little stronger, a little more resilient. I'd survived.

Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I'd been running for so very long and pass along the inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it... Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN

You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself," Margot promised.

emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.