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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological — technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science.
Stephen Hawking1942–2018From Hawking’s article A Brief History of Relativity, in Time magazine (31 December 1999)
- Science
- Technology
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured.
Hannah Arendt1906–1975Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books (1974)
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James1843–1916“Robert Louis Stevenson,” Century Magazine (April 1888)
There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
Euripides481–407 BCIphigenia in Tauris, ll. 721–722 (Bartlett’s, 1892)
- Luck
If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
Timothy Leary1920–1996Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982)
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Nelson Mandela1918–2013Long Walk to Freedom (1995)
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
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Ch. XX: The Flower of Eden
- Happiness
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Russell Baker1925–2019“The Fact About Progress,” The New York Times (1970-02-24)
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
Edith Wharton1862–1937A Backward Glance (1934), “A First Word”
The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
Winston Churchill1874–1965Speech in the House of Commons, November 12, 1936 “Debate on the Address”
- Responsibility
The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons.
Arthur C. Clarke1917–2008Foreword to The Collected Stories (June 2000)
- Technology
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
- America
You say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865The Cooper Union Address (1860)
- Politics
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress (1862)
- Thinking