Quotes about change
page 44

Nile Kinnick photo
George W. Bush photo
Brandon Boyd photo

“I wouldn't change a thing now that you're here.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, A Crow Left of the Murder... (2004)

Susie Bright photo

“This makes it morally unchristian for any human to legislate spiritual change since God himself does not force his people to do the same.”

Comments on the government's proposed Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, 2 August 2005

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“I will propose a Highway Safety Act of 1966 to seek an end to this mounting tragedy. We must also act to prevent the deception of the American consumer—requiring all packages to state clearly and truthfully their contents—all interest and credit charges to be fully revealed—and keeping harmful drugs and cosmetics away from our stores. It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention. We must change to master change. I propose to take steps to modernize and streamline the executive branch, to modernize the relations between city and state and nation. A new Department of Transportation is needed to bring together our transportation activities. The present structure—35 government agencies, spending $5 billion yearly—makes it almost impossible to serve either the growing demands of this great nation or the needs of the industry, or the right of the taxpayer to full efficiency and real frugality. I will propose in addition a program to construct and to flight-test a new supersonic transport airplane that will fly three times the speed of sound—in excess of 2,000 miles per hour. I propose to examine our federal system-the relation between city, state, nation, and the citizens themselves. We need a commission of the most distinguished scholars and men of public affairs to do this job. I will ask them to move on to develop a creative federalism to best use the wonderful diversity of our institutions and our people to solve the problems and to fulfill the dreams of the American people. As the process of election becomes more complex and more costly, we must make it possible for those without personal wealth to enter public life without being obligated to a few large contributors. Therefore, I will submit legislation to revise the present unrealistic restriction on contributions—to prohibit the endless proliferation of committees, bringing local and state committees under the act—to attach strong teeth and severe penalties to the requirement of full disclosure of contributions—and to broaden the participation of the people, through added tax incentives, to stimulate small contributions to the party and to the candidate of their choice.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Alan Sugar photo

“All I've heard from you so far is a lot of hot air, so in the interests of climate change you're fired…”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

to Stuart Baggs in the boardroom
The Apprentice, Series 6

Fritjof Capra photo
Gancho Tsenov photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Henry Fountain Ashurst photo
John Cage photo
Sonia Sotomayor photo
John C. Dvorak photo

“The tablet market has only succeeded as a niche market over the years and it was hoped Apple would dream up some new paradigm to change all that. From what I've seen and heard, this won't be it.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

"Hello, giant iPod Touch" in MarketWatch (29 January 2010) http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-ipad-is-far-from-revolutionary-2010-01-29
2010s

Irving Kristol photo
Bob Dylan photo

“You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn't enough to change my heart”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Idiot Wind

Alberto Manguel photo
George W. Bush photo
Mao Zedong photo

“For many years we Communists have struggled for a cultural revolution as well as for a political and economic revolution, and our aim is to build a new society and a new state for the Chinese nation. That new society and new state will have not only a new politics and a new economy but a new culture. In other words, not only do we want to change a China that is politically oppressed and economically exploited into a China that is politically free and economically prosperous, we also want to change the China which is being kept ignorant and backward under the sway of the old culture into an enlightened and progressive China under the sway of a new culture. In short, we want to build a new China. Our aim in the cultural sphere is to build a new Chinese national culture.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

We Want to Build a New China
On New Democracy (1940)
Original: (zh-CN) 我们共产党人,多年以来,不但为中国的政治革命和经济革命而奋斗,而且为中国的文化革命而奋斗;一切这些的目的,在于建设一个中华民族的新社会和新国家。在这个新社会和新国家中,不但有新政治、新经济,而且有新文化。这就是说,我们不但要把一个政治上受压迫、经济上受剥削的中国,变为一个政治上自由和经济上繁荣的中国,而且要把一个被旧文化统治因而愚昧落后的中国,变为一个被新文化统治因而文明先进的中国。一句话,我们要建立一个新中国。建立中华民族的新文化,这就是我们在文化领域中的目的。

Thomas Carlyle photo
Talcott Parsons photo
Bill Nye photo

“We have overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing. That you cannot tie any one event to that is not the same as doubt about the whole thing. There is no debate in the scientific community.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Bill Nye , ‘the science guy,’ vs. Marsh Blackburn, the climate change skeptic congresswoman, Knoxville News Sentinel: Blogs, Knoxville, Tennessee, February 17, 2014]

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo

“Fundamentally, a manager is looking to answer these questions: ‘what to change?’,’ what to change to?’ and ‘ how to cause the change?”

Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947–2011) Israeli physicist and management guru

The goal: a process of ongoing improvement (1984)

Will Eisner photo
Michel De Montaigne photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Kazimir Malevich photo

“.. [to gather] under a new banner.... [that the poets of yesterday's Futurism ] change the means of battle with thought, content, and logic.... advance Alogism after Futurism.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote of Malevich, Nov. 1915; as cited by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 26
1910 - 1920

Guy De Maupassant photo

“What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Variant translation:
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How singular life is, how changeable! What a little thing it takes to save you or to lose you.
La Parure (The Necklace) (1884)

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Mao Zedong photo
Will Eisner photo
Pranab Mukherjee photo
Benjamin Harrison photo

“I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night's rest was best in any event.”

Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) American politician, 23rd President of the United States (in office from 1889 to 1893)

As quoted in A Call to America : Inspiring and Empowering Quotations from the 43 presidents of the United States (2002) by Bryan Curtis

Charles Evans Hughes photo

“…[I]n three notable instances the Court has suffered severely from self-inflicted wounds. The first of these was the Dred Scott case. … There the Supreme Court decided that Dred Scott, a negro, not being a citizen could not sue in the United States Courts and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. … [T]he grave injury that the Court sustained through its decision has been universally recognized. Its action was a public calamity. … [W]idespread and bitter attacks upon the judges who joined in the decision undermined confidence in the Court. … It was many years before the Court, even under new judges, was able to retrieve its reputation.…[The second instance was] the legal tender cases decided in 1870. … From the standpoint of the effect on public opinion there can be no doubt that the reopening of the case was a serious mistake and the overruling in such a short time, and by one vote, of the previous decision shook popular respect for the Court.… [The third instance happened] [t]wenty-five years later, when the Court had recovered its prestige, [and] its action in the income tax cases gave occasion for a bitter assault. … [After questions about the validity of the income tax] had been reserved owing to an equal division of the Court, a reargument was ordered and in the second decision the act was held to be unconstitutional by a majority of one. Justice Jackson was ill at the time of the first argument but took part in the final decision, voting in favor of the validity of the statute. It was evident that the result [holding the statute invalid] was brought about by a change in the vote of one of the judges who had participated in the first decision. … [T]he decision of such an important question by a majority of one after one judge had changed his vote aroused a criticism of the Court which has never been entirely stilled.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

"The Supreme Court of the United States: Its Foundation, Methods and Achievements," Columbia University Press, p. 50 (1928). ISBN 1-893122-85-9.

Friedrich Hayek photo

“The next time I met Ludwig Wittgenstein was in the spring of 1928 when the economist Dennis Robertson, who was taking me for a walk through the Fellows' Gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly decided to change course because on the top of a little rise he perceived the form of the philosopher draped over a deckchair. He evidently stood rather in awe of him, and he did not wish to disturb him.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

" Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020", Encounter ( August 1977 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug). Page 21.
1960s–1970s

Victor Villaseñor photo

“Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians. These parallel global warmings -- observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth -- can only be a straightline consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance.”

Khabibullo Abdusamatov (1940) Russian astrophysicist

as quoted by Lawrence Solomon in Look to Mars for the truth on global warming http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=edae9952-3c3e-47ba-913f-7359a5c7f723&k=0/, National Post, January 26, 2007.

“It is the fashion to talk of our changing climate and bewail the hot summers and hard winters of tradition, but how seldom we pause to marvel at the remarkable constancy of the weather from year to year.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

November Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Andrei Sakharov photo
Eleftherios Venizelos photo

“Of course the King is mistaken. But is natural that he should be frighten of taking the plunge. We have lost a great opportunity by not intervening at once. But later the King may change his mind, and it may be not too late.”

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) Greek politician

Source: Victory of Venizelos, 1920, p. 176 ; After one of the many attempts of Venizelos to persuade King Constantine, that Greece should join the Allies in the World War I.

Khalid A. Al-Falih photo
Fernand Léger photo
Victor Hugo photo
A. R. Rahman photo

“Perhaps most surprisingly, the papers show that that, as late as 1984, the pope did not believe the Communist Polish government could be changed.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Freedom's Men: The Cold War Team of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan (2005)

Koenraad Elst photo
Emir Kusturica photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Trip Hawkins photo

“[The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.”

Trip Hawkins (1953) American businessman

Quoted in The Amazing PlayStation 2, Newsweek (via PR Newswire), 2006-02-26, 2007-01-21 http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/02-27-2000/0001150833&EDATE,

James Callaghan photo
Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden photo

“For me it is important to live in harmony with developments in Sweden and all over the changing world around us that we are actually part of.”

Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (1946) King of Sweden

royalcorrespondent.com http://royalcorrespondent.com/2013/02/15/an-interview-with-his-majesty-king-carl-xvi-gustaf-of-sweden/

Emma Goldman photo
Manav Gupta photo

“Let us stop a while, while doing what we are doing, and begin to change what we can change…”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

"Beyond Politics, Beyond Copenhagen, For Our Children" : Treatise, Travelling trilogy, Lectures and Films on Sustainable development by Manav Gupta (2009 -2010), as quoted in Hindustan Times (25 December 2009)
2000s

Subh-i-Azal photo
Jeffrey Montgomery photo
Geoffrey West photo

“Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s
Source: Jonah Lehredec. " A Physicist Solves the City http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1," in www.nytimes.com. Dec 17, 2010.

Frans de Waal photo

“I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

Frans de Waal, in a NOVA interview, " The Bonobo in All of Us" PBS (1 January 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bonobo-all-us.html; quotes from this interview were for some time misplaced on this page, which probably generated similar misattributions elsewhere, and the misplacement was not discovered until after this quotation had been selected for Quote of the Day, as a quote of Goodall. Corrections were subsequently made here, during the day the quote was posted as QOTD.
The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)

Oliver Lodge photo

“Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is. We change our state at birth, and come into the world of air and sense and myriad existence; we change our state at death and enter a region of—what?”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, p. 298 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=340
Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Morarji Desai photo

“There is an inherent quality [resistant to change] in this country which doesn’t allow anybody to destroy it. Whoever tries to destroy it will himself be destroyed. Ravan was destroyed.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

Morarji Desai speaks about life and celibacy

David Deutsch photo
Enoch Powell photo

“It is conventional to refer to the United Nations in hushed tones of respect and awe, as if it were the repository of justice and equity, speaking almost with the voice of God if not yet acting with the power of God. It is no such thing. Despite the fair-seeming terminology of its charter and its declarations, the reality both of the Assembly and of the Security Council is a concourse of self-seeking nations, obeying their own prejudices and pursuing their own interests. They have not changed their individual natures by being aggregated with others in a system of bogus democracy…Does anybody seriously suppose that the members of the United Nations, or of the Security Council, have been actuated in their decisions on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by a pure desire to see right done and wrong reversed? That was the last thing on their minds. Everyone of them, from the United States to Peru, calculated its own interests and consulted its own ambitions. What moral authority can attach a summation of self-interest and prejudice? I am not saying that nations ought not to pursue their own interests; they ought and, in any case, they will. What I am saying is that those interests are not sanctified by being tumbled into a mixer and shaken up altogether. An assembly of national spokesmen is not magically transmuted into a glorious company of saints and martyrs. Its only redeeming feature is its impotence…The United Nations is a colossal coating of humbug poured, like icing over a birthday cake, over the naked ambitions and hostilities of the nations.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'We have the will, we don't need the humbug', The Times (12 June 1982), p. 12
1980s

John Gray photo
Ma Fuxiang photo

“If Muslim people do not change their mind in spite of the changes of social conditions, and if we supplement Islamic courtesy and law without explaining and advertising real Islamic beliefs at the same time, then it is impossible to save the minds of the people.”

Ma Fuxiang (1876–1932) Chinese politician

The completion of the idea of dual loyalty towards China and Islam, Masumi, Matsumoto, 2010-06-28 http://science-islam.net/article.php3?id_article=676&lang=fr,

Torquato Tasso photo

“For in a world so mutable and blind
it's often constancy to change one's mind.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Chè nel mondo mutabile e leggiero,
Costanza è spesso il variar pensiero.
Canto V, stanza 3 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Claude Debussy photo

“Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in The Twentieth Century (1972) by Caroline Farrar Ware, p. 222
Variant translation: Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood photo
Theodore Schultz photo
Ai Weiwei photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“I am thinking about changing the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Tweet published by @realdonaldtrump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881273362454118400 (1 July 2017)
2010s, 2017, July

Denis Healey photo

“I would fight to change the policy before the General Election. If I failed then I wouldn't accept office in a Labour Government.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

On unilateral nuclear disarmament. (The Guardian, 15 September 1981).
1980s

Joseph Beuys photo

“This is precisely what the shaman does in order to bring about change and development: his nature is therapeutic.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-garde Artist, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 95
Quotes after 1984, posthumous published

W. Richard Scott photo
Philip Larkin photo
Kate Bush photo

“Let's change things.
Let's danger it up.
We're crazy enough.
I just can't take it.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

“Once you know the rules of the game, you can change them.”

Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher

Source: Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents (2001), p. 94

Enoch Powell photo

“I was born ambitious, I suppose I shall die ambitious. I can no more change it than the colour of my eyes.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Russell Harty Plus, ITV (1973), excerpted in "Odd Man Out", BBC TV profile by Michael Cockerell transmitted on 11 November 1995
1970s

Roberto Clemente photo

“Anytime I feel something is wrong I'm gonna say something. Baseball has changed in many ways since I first came to the big leagues. Ballplayers feel they can speak up much more now than they did then. I spoke up even then. […] I didn't like some of the things the white players said to Roberts so I said some things to them that they didn't like.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Sports Parade" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=OkAaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=mSQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6377%2C3858585 by Milton Richman, in The Hendersonville Times-News (Wednesday, April 21, 1971), p. 9
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

James Jeans photo
Gordon B. Hinckley photo
George W. Bush photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Patricia Conde photo

“Fame doesn't change anyone, it just finds idiots; if you are a anonymous idiot, only your family know it; but if you are famous, all people will know that you are idiot.”

Patricia Conde (1979) Spanish actress

La fama no cambia a nadie, lo único que hace es descubrir a los idiotas; si eres un idiota anónimo, sólo lo saben en tu casa y poco más, pero cuando eres famoso, lo sabrán en todo el mundo que lo eres.
blog oficial Patricia Conde