Marilyn Ferguson: Quotes about change

Marilyn Ferguson was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on change.
Marilyn Ferguson: 256 quotes3 likes

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”

Marilyn Ferguson

“Many researchers say they have been shaken by their own findings about changes in conscious functioning because of the implications for widespread social change. There are hard facts to face, not just soft speculation.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Three, Brains Changing, Minds Changing

“If we look at the reality of the world from the viewpoint of the industrial era, it is clear that there is no hope But there is another way to look at our situation. We can discover the large number of people who have decided to change. … If we do this, it seems equally impossible that we shall fail to solve our problems.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

“A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history. This network is the Aquarian Conspiracy. It is a conspiracy without a political doctrine. Without a manifesto. With conspirators who seek power only to disperse it, and whose strategies are pragmatic, even scientific, but whose perspective sounds so mystical that they hesitate to discuss it. Activists asking different kinds of questions, challenging the establishment from within.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

“Mental states such as loneliness, compulsion, anguish, attachment, pain, and faith are not just "all in the head" but in the brain as well. Brain, mind, and body are a continuum. Our thoughts—intention, fear, images, suggestion, expectation— alter the brain's chemistry. And it works both ways; thoughts can be altered by changing the brain's chemistry with drugs, nutrients, oxygen. The brain is hopelessly complex.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

“The revolution was in the minds of the people. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. Long before the first shot is fired, the revolution begins. Long after truce is declared, it continues to overturn lives.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

“The most potent force for change, however, is the growing recognition of millions of adults that their own impoverished expectations and frustrations came, in large measure, from their schooling.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“The business of the Aquarian Conspiracy is calm diagnosis of that illness—to make it clear that synthesis is needed—paradigm change rather than pendulum change.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“Another strong force for change: crisis. All the failures of education, like a fever, signal a deep struggle for health.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“Yet there are reasons for optimism. Our error has been in assuming that we had to start with the schools. Schools are an effect of the way we think—and we can change the way we think.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“Schools are entrenched bureaucracies whose practitioners do not compete for business, do not need to get re-elected or to attract patients, customers, clients. Those educators who would like to innovate have relatively little authority to change their style.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“You can only have a new society, the visionaries have said, if you change the education of the younger generation. Yet the new society itself is the necessary force for change in education.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

“If our memories are as absorbent as research has demonstrated, our awareness as wide, our brains and bodies as sensitive; if we can will changes in our physiology at the level of a single cell; if we are heirs to such evolutionary virtuosity—how can we be performing and learning at such mediocre levels? If we're so rich, why aren't we smart?”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn, p. 279

“For all its reputed conservatism, Western medicine is undergoing an amazing revitalization. Patients and professionals alike are beginning to see beyond symptoms to the context of illness: stress, society, family, diet, season, emotions. Just as the readiness of a new constituency makes a new politics, the needs of patients can change the practice of medicine.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

“The hope for real social transformation need not rest on circumstantial evidence. One major arena, health care, has already begun to experience wrenching change. The impending transformation of medicine is a window to the transformation of all our institutions. Here we can see what happens when consumers begin to withdraw legitimacy from an authoritarian institution. We see the rise of the autonomous health seeker, the transformation of a profession by its leadership, the impact of the new models from science, the way decentralized networks are effecting wide geographic change.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

“If we consider that any child being abused is our child, the problem changes. When we see our culture, our social conditioning, or our class as an artifact rather than a universal yardstick, our kinship expands. We are no longer "ethnocentric," centered in our own culture.”

Marilyn Ferguson

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing, p. 402

“We know the necessary conditions for the changing of minds. Now that we see the deep pathology of our past, we can make new patterns, new paradigms. "The sum of all our days is just our beginning...."”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

“Relatives, colleagues, friends, and marriage partners, understandably threatened by these changes, often exert pressure on the individual...These pressures only widen the gap. You don't stop an immigrant by trying to revive his hopes for the Old World.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing

“Ongoing personal transformation moves one away from the Old World— sometimes abruptly, more often over years. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, people change jobs, even vocations, in the wake of shifting perceptions.”

Marilyn Ferguson

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing