Source: Thought is Your Enemy (1990), Chapter II: Throw Away Your Crutches
“Every ruler wants to maintain the status quo.”
            Interlude “Summer, 1818” (p. 170) 
The Stress of Her Regard (1989)
        
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Tim Powers 63
American writer 1952Related quotes
“Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.”
Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.132
Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist
“Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo — and today there can be no status quo.”
                                        
                                         Address Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States — Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles (15 July 1960) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx<!-- Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project --> 
1960 
Context: Their platform, made up of left-over Democratic planks, has the courage of our old convictions. Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo — and today there can be no status quo.
                                    
“I am not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
                                        
                                        This is a quote by Newt Gingrich, first appearing in an article in the Los Angeles Times in 1991.  http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-25/magazine/tm-2004_1_newt-gingrich/2 
Misattributed
                                    
                                        
                                        Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419; a portion of this paragraph has sometimes been misquoted as: "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion." 
Context: Our code must be framed to speed the absorption of immigrants into our economy, culture and society; to fuse the returning tribes into a homogeneous national and cultural unit; to forward our physical and moral healing and the cleansing of our lives from the trivia and dross which gathered upon us in dependence and exile. To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion. Laws which lag behind development, merely a digest of experience and the lessons of the past, are useless to us. We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.
                                    
“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.”
Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 83
Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 3, on the oppressive status quo