quotations about change
Every generation gets a chance to change the world
Pity the nation that won't listen to your boys and girls
Cause the sweetest melody is the one we haven't heard
U2
"I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight"
The same is not always the same.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not sure who the first person was who said that. Probably Shakespeare. Or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it's the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw, my inability to change. I don't think I'm alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it's kind of everyone's flaw. Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still ... it feels safer somehow. And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar.
EPHRAM BROWN
"My Brother's Keeper", Everwood
The very word "change" has changed. When I was young--and not just because I was young--we looked forward with confident impatience to change. Planned, controlled, beneficent change would continue to clear slums, sweep up the remains of empire, raise living and educational standards, tidy away--firmly but kindly--the last aboriginals who still raved about martial glory or the pride of wealth. Now, as it seems to me, change is set almost exclusively in the minor key, change seen overwhelmingly as loss.
NEAL ASCHERSON
"Chords of Identity in a Minor Key", Games with Shadows
Lasting change can only come from within.
AHSOKA TANO
"The Academy", Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Many ... are simply skeptical that real change can occur. There is so much fear, so much mistrust that has built up over the years. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith in every country. You more than anyone have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jun. 4, 2009
I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes.
GENEEN ROTH
Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
Those who object to what is new are controlled by the love of what is old.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Change", Reactions and Other Essays
A man can always change things. That's what makes him different from the barnyard critters.
MA STONE
All That Money Can Buy
My life changes all the time.
Things were different when you were mine.
You loved me yesterday.
Now these changes have come to stay.
ROY ORBISON
"Changes"
Change happened and you thought it was forever, and immediately there were all the enemies of that change making common cause and meeting in the cloakrooms.
C. J. CHERRYH
Chanur's Legacy
How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Things must change
We must rearrange them
Or we'll have to estrange them
All that I'm saying
A game's not worth playing
Over and over again
DEPECHE MODE
"The Sun and the Rainfall"
Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.
ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
Fear and Conventionality
Things do not change; we change.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So, what are we, helpless? Puppets? Nah. The big moments are gonna come, you can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that count. That's when you find out who you are.
WHISTLER
"Becoming: Part Two", Buffy the Vampire Slayer
If you wish to be happy, think not of what is to come nor of that which you have no control over but rather of the now and of that which you are able to change.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr