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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions.
Denis Diderot1713–1784Dying words of Nicholas Saunderson as portrayed in Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] (1749)
Change is inevitable. Change is constant.
Benjamin Disraeli1804–1881
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881Crime and Punishment (1867), Part I, Chapter IIIn context
- Character
But that is the beginning of a new story⁠—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881Crime and Punishment (1867), Epilogue, Chapter IIIn context
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Frederick Douglass1817–1895West India Emancipation (If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress) (1857)
- Freedom
The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.
Peter Drucker1909–2005MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 44
Strictly speaking, relativism does not permit social progress, because the new culture is by definition no better than the one it replaced.
Dinesh D'Souzaborn 1961The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 6
- Philosophy
The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization.
Will Durant1885–1981Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917)
- History
A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.
Umberto Eco1932–2016Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), [O] : Introduction, 0.7
- Philosophy
Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.
Dwight D. Eisenhower1890–1969Address at the Cow Palace on Accepting the Nomination of the Republican National Convention (August 23, 1956)
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
George Eliot1819–1880Middlemarch (1871-72)In context
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), May-Day
- Nature
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882The Conservative (1841)
- Politics
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
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Anatole France1844–1924The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), Pt. II, ch. 4