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Quotes about change

166 quotes from 131 people

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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
Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
Aleister Crowley1875–1947Magick Book IV: Liber ABA, Part III: Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), Introduction
No real social change has ever come about without a revolution.
Emma Goldman1869–1940Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For”
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
Robert F. Kennedy1925–1968The Opening to the Future Adress at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (June 8, 1964)
- History
Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change
To something new, to something strange
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882Kéramos (1878), st. 3
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.
Bruce Lee1940–1973Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000); here, Lee was reciting lines he wrote for his short lived role on the TV series Longstreet.
- Advice
In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
Charles Mingus1922–1979Statement to Nat Hentoff , as quoted in California Rock, California Sound: The Music of Los Angeles and Southern California (1979) by Anthony Fawcett, p. 56
- Music
If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.
Eldridge Cleaver1935–1998Soul on Ice (1968)
- Hope
- Race
It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.
PSPublilius Syrus101–101 BCSentences, Maxim 469
- Decisions
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)
Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear.
Pema Chödrönborn 1936When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)
- Fear
Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.
Ronald Reagan1911–2004Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address (1989)
We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.
Ernst Jünger1895–1998The Glass Bees (1957)
- Character
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving1783–1859Tales of a Traveler (1824), Preface, p. 7
- Comedy
It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived.
Sri Aurobindo1872–1950India’s Rebirth, 22 September 1907