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After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second glass you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900Said about Absinthe. Quoted in Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde: With Reminiscences of the Author (London: Duckworth, 1930)
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)
- Change
- Technology
All of us who have time and money to spare, travel — that is to say, we flee; since surely it is not so much a question of travelling as of getting away? Which of us has not some sorrow to dull, or some yoke to cast off?
George Sand1804–1876Un Hiver à Majorque, pt. 1, ch. 4 (1855); Robert Graves (trans.) Winter in Majorca (Chicago: Academy Press, 1978) p. 29
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
- Change
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)
- Change
- 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)
- Change
- Thinking
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge1772–1834Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)In context
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)
- Change
- Time
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.
Upton Sinclair1878–1968The Profits of Religion (1918), Introductory, “Bootstrap-lifting”
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
Robert Frost1874–1963Steeple Bush (1947), “Directive”, l. 55
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
- Change
No real social change has ever come about without a revolution.
Emma Goldman1869–1940Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For”
- Change
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)
- Change
- History
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.
Albert Camus1913–1960The Myth of Sisyphus
One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse.
Sigmund Freud1856–1939“New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis” (1933)