quotations about change
A man can always change things. That's what makes him different from the barnyard critters.
MA STONE
All That Money Can Buy
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
Small change, small wonders--these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. It's a workable economy.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Small Wonder
We pay for every change we make ... and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Change in all things is sweet.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time being made.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Vague Thoughts on Art
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"
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
Don't go changing to try and please me
You never let me down before
BILLY JOEL
"Just the Way You Are"
Nature obliges everything to change about.
One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age;
Another grows in its place from a negligible start.
So time alters the whole nature of the world
And earth passes from one state to another.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Nothing lasts. That's what makes everything ... so precious.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
The architecture of change involves the design and construction of new patterns, or the reconceptualization of old ones, to make new, and hopefully more productive, actions possible.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
The Change Masters
The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
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
To change the name and not the letter,
Is a change for the worst, and not for the better.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
Book of Days
Weep not that the world changes -- did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Mutation
Everything is the same as always.
PETER WEISS
The Tower
Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change?
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting them be what they are.
DR. MEREDITH GREY
"With You I'm Born Again", Grey's Anatomy
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