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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.
Marcel Proust1871–1922In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919)
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt1906–1975The New Yorker (12 September 1970)
- Politics
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin1924–1987“As Much Truth As One Can Bear” in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1962); republished in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011), edited by Randall Kenan
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
Aldous Huxley1894–1963Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
Eugene V. Debs1855–1926Speech in Cleveland, Ohio.(Sept. 11, 1918) Eugene V. Debs Speaks, ed. Jean Y. Tussey (1970)
- History
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
When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: “My dear, we live in an age of transition.”
William Ralph Inge1860–1954Assessments and Anticipations (1929), p. 261
- Comedy
Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
Malcolm X1925–1965Malcolm X Speaks (1965)
- Anger
I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.
James A. Garfield1831–1881Garfield’s Words (1882)
It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.
Alan Watts1915–1973The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.
Emma Goldman1869–1940“Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap”, a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
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
Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Political Ideals (1917)
- Hope
So the pendulum swings, now violently, now slowly; and every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
William Ralph Inge1860–1954“Democracy and the Future” The Atlantic Monthly (March 1922)
- History
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Robert F. Kennedy1925–1968Day of Affirmation Address, University of Cape Town (6 June 1966)
- History