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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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If things do not change, there will be nothing left to change. Either power must pass to the people or everything will perish.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto1928–1979Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 14.
- Power
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
The Bible (King James Version)Ecclesiastes 3:1 (KJV)In context
- Time
The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.
Bonoborn 1960PENN Address (2004)
- Inspiration
Those who adhere to the past won’t be able to cope with the future.
Willy Brandt1913–1992Speech at the extraordinary SPD party convention (18 November 1971)
- Time
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.
JBJacob Braude
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. (Weil die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, werden die Dinge nicht so bleiben wie sie sind.)
Bertolt Brecht1898–1956Posthumous publication
Progress is
The law of life: man is not Man as yet.
Robert Browning1812–1889Paracelsus (1835), Part 5.
Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
Robert Browning1812–1889“A Death in the Desert”, Dramatis Personae (1864), line 586
- Hope
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
- Government
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792)
- Nature
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done⁠—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.
Frances Hodgson Burnett1849–1924The Secret Garden (1911), Chapter XXVIIIn context
- Ideas
Friends of my youth, a last adieu! haply some day we meet again;
Yet ne’er the self-same men shall meet; the years shall make us other men.
Richard Francis Burton1821–1890The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
- Friendship
A change came o’er the spirit of my dream.
Lord Byron1788–1824The Dream (1816), Stanza 3.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell1904–1987A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (1991), p. 18
- Life & Death
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Mark Carneyborn 1965Speech at WEF, Davos (January 20, 2026)