Quotes about alteration
page 2

“God only rarely reveals the future. When he does so, it is for one reason: it's a future that was written so as to be altered.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

God, Future

“There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Dead

“But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Life, Change, Chance, Past

“Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.”

Glen Duncan (1965) British writer

Source: Talulla Rising

Literature, Heart

“One cannot alter a condition with the same mind set that created it in the first place.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant: Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.

“Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Past

“Every two people cause and intersection. Every person alters the world.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

People, World, Personality

“The thing about fate, Magnus: even if we can't change the big picture, our choices can alter the details. That's how we rebel against destiny, how we make our mark. What will you choose to do?”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

Fate, Change

“even if we can’t change the big picture, our choices can alter the details. That’s how we rebel against destiny”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

Change

“What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Change

“I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Life, Flowers

“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“Prolong not the past
Invite not the future
Do not alter your innate wakefulness
Fear not appearances
There in nothing more than this”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Fear, Appearance, Past, Future

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Game, Reality, Memory

“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Source: Silent Spring

World, Nature, Time

“I love you is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations–taking away the I, adding a word like lots or loads–render it meaningless.”

David Nicholls book Us

Source: Us

Love

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government…”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1770s, Declaration of Independence (1776)
Context: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Life, Happiness, People

“at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.”

Cecelia Ahern book Thanks for the Memories

Source: Thanks for the Memories

“A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Unbound

Source: Lover Unbound

Books

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

People

“He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

World

“Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Change

“In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Life, Pain, People, Way

“Sometimes,' Jem said, 'our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our minds and hearts. It's those times, I think, when our lives have altered but we still long for the time before everything was altered.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Thinking, Change, Time, Heart

“I've come to believe that in everyone's life, there's one undeniable moment of change, a set of circumstances that suddenly alters everything.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Source: Safe Haven

Life, Change

“We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Love, Time

“I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Catherine Earnshaw (Ch. IX).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)

Life, Dreams, Idea, Water

“You write in order to change the world… if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

People, World, Way, Reality

“Which of us is not saying to himself
which of us has not been saying to himself all
his life:
"
I shall alter that when I have a little
more time"?
We never shall have any more time. We
have, and we have always had, all the time
there is.”

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) English novelist

Source: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

Life, Time

“Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

Change, Future

“Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.”

Sharon Salzberg (1952) American writer

Life, Change

“Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Help

“The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works

Soul

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Memory, Past

“If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

God

“If we can't alter the tide of events, at least we can be nearby with towels to mop up.”

Peter David (1956) American writer of comic books, novels, television, movies and video games

Source: Q-In-Law

“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Context: This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

Love, People, Hope, Housing

“Hey, you created me! I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Feeling

“The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Source: The Woman Destroyed

Way, Question

“God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

God, Past, Future

“All human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.”

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist

“The best mind-altering drug is truth.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Contributions of Jane Wagner

Truth

“The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Engineering Souls http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_sndgs03.html (March 22, 2007). <br class="br">City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Men, World, Soul, Change

“The now famous slogan 'keep calm and carry on' poster from 1939 was designed as a motivational poster for people living in cities expecting to be bombed by the Nazis. But the UK wasn't just 'keeping calm': we had taken a stand like no other country in the world and declared war on a barbaric regime which was a global threat to peace and security. Today, as we wait to hear news from Manchester following the slaughter and maiming of innocent children, we have people calling for us to do nothing. But it's not the same 'carry on' as in 1939: they want us to accept terror attacks as a part of life we should now accept. Well, I don't accept it. How many people are we going to sacrifice on the alter (sic) of political correctness before we build up the courage to confront what most people will happily admit to their friends and family: that we are facing a continuing threat from radical Islam which hashtags and tea lights will not stop?”

Jane Collins (1962) British politician

Jane Collins MEP responds to terror attacks in Manchester http://jane-collins.org/news.php?id=79. Item on official website (May 23, 2017).

Life, War, Children, People

“Last Sunday we made a bicycle tour of 80 km. Through the North along the edge of the province [Groningen].... On such a day I get again a lot of impressions which will reappear in altered forms in due time. Beautiful landscapes, nice small roads, beautiful farms, meadows with horses and cattle, birds, water and a lot of sunshine. Mills and towers and trees are breaking the lines of the flat land..”

Hendrik Werkman (1882–1945) Dutch artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Hendrik Werkman, in het Nederlands): Zondag maakten we een fietstocht van 80 km. Door het Noorden langs de rand van de provincie [Groningen].. .Op zoo’n dag doe ik weer heel wat indrukken op die te gelegener tijd omgewerkt weer tevoorschijn komen. Mooie landschappen, aardige weggetjes, prachtige boerderijen, weiden met paarden en vee, vogels, water en zonneschijn volop. Molens en torens en boomen breken de lijnen van het vlakke land..
In a letter to Henkels, 12 July 1944; as cited in H. N. Werkman - Leven & Werk - 1882-1945, ed. A. de Vries, J. van der Spek, D. Sijens, M. Jansen; WBooks, Groninger Museum / Stichting Werkman, 2015 (transl: Fons Heijnsbroek), p. 18
1940's

Beauty, Bird, Tree, Water

“It is possible for you to project to a future event in which you will be involved and by an act that you make in the projection, alter the course that this future will take. Such an action would therefore appear to happen twice, once in your present and once in your future. But in the future, you would be the one whose course is altered from this traveling self from the past.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 322, quoting from Session 262

Travel, Appearance, Past, Future

“The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 17-18

World, Reality, Suffering

“The question we must ask ourselves as a culture is whether we want to embrace the change that must come, or resist it. Are we so attached to the dietary fallacies with which we were raised, so afraid to counter the arbitrary laws of eating taught to us in childhood by our misinformed parents, that we cannot alter the course they set us on, even if it leads to our own ruin? Does the prospect of standing apart or encountering ridicule scare us even from saving ourselves?”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 9: Going Home, p. 188

Law, Question, Parent, Change

“With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Martin Gayford, " 'Photography is crumbling,' " http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/05/18/bahock18.xml The Telegraph, (18 May 2004) <br class="br">2000s

War, Time, Painting

“When traditional Australians argue that Asian migrants should be welcome but that the ethnic mix of the nation should not be altered too quickly, they are labelled racists. But when ethnic minorities lobby politicians to enlist as many new migrants as possible from their own race, this is applauded as multiculturalism.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"Immigration: Australia's Rag Doll,", The Weekend Australian (June 2-3, 1990)

“Certain changes have been going on in business practice which are destined, I believe, to alter our thinking fundamentally. I think this is a contribution which business is going to make to the world, and not only to the business world, but eventually to government and international relations. Men may be making useful products, but beyond this, by helping to solve the problems of human relations, they are perhaps destined to lead the world in the solution of those great problems of coordination and control upon which our future progress must depend.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xxviii

Men, World, Business, Problem

“It would be different if there were some great widespread public indigonation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way…About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1968/nov/19/house-of-lords-reform#S5CV0773P0_19681119_HOC_305 (19 November 1968) regarding proposals for reforming the House of Lords. <br class="br">1960s

People, Truth, Angels, Way

“The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. …The conic sections, invented in an attempt to solve the problem of doubling the alter of an oracle, ended by becoming the orbits followed by the planets… The imaginary magnitudes invented by Cardan and Bombelli describe… the characteristic features of alternating currents. The absolute differential calculus, which originated as a fantasy of Reimann, became the mathematical model for the theory of Relativity. And the matrices which were a complete abstraction in the days of Cayley and Sylvester appear admirably adapted to the… quantum of the atom.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Number: The Language of Science (1930)

Mathematics, Problem, Appearance

“The ultimate stakes in politics are the qualities of the direct relations among people…. This fine texture of routinized human relations is the primary social reality. Even the boldest transformative efforts often take it for granted or, having acknowledged its importance, fail to alter it.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 397

People, Reality, Effort

“[My] approach recognizes the basic principle of a written Constitution. We "the people" adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning, a meaning that does not change. Otherwise we would have adopted the British approach of an unwritten, evolving constitution. Aside from amendment according to Article V, the Constitution’s meaning cannot be updated, or changed, or altered by the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the President. Of course, even when strictly interpreted as I believe it should be, the Constitution remains a modern, "breathing" document as some like to call it, in the sense that the Court is constantly required to interpret how its provisions apply to the Constitutional questions of modern life. Nevertheless, strict interpretation must never surrender to the understandably attractive impulse towards creative but unwarranted alterations of first principles.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Speech to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 2 February 2001.
2000s

Life, People, Understanding, Question

“Lamarck, after having first studied botany with success, had then turned his attention to conchology, and soon became aware that in the newer (or tertiary) strata of the earth's crust there were a multitude of fossil species of shells… He also observed that other shells were so nearly allied to living forms, that it was difficult not to suspect that they had been connected by a common bond of descent. He therefore proposed that the element of time should enter into the definition of a species, and that it should run thus: 'A species consists of individuals all resembling each other, and reproducing their like by generation, so long as the surrounding conditions do not undergo changes sufficient to cause their habits, characters, and forms to vary. He came at last to the conclusion, that none of the animals and plants now existing were primordial creations, but were all derived from pre-existing forms, which, after they may have gone on for indefinite ages reproducing their like, had, at length, by the influence of alterations in climate and in the animate world, been made to vary gradually, and adapt themselves to new circumstances, some of them deviating, in the course of ages, so far from their original type as to have claims to be regarded as new species.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 389-390

Age, World, Study, Change

“It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 22

World

“State building can be viewed as the historical process by which groups outside of the state are able to get domains organized by the state to make rules for some set of societal fields. These rules reflect the interests of the most powerful groups in various fields. Politically oriented social movements are, by definition, outside of some established field of a given state. They are oriented toward either creating a new domain where they will have power, or taking over and transforming an existing domain or even the entire state. At any given moment, there are political projects in the fields that make up states (i. e., “normal politics”) and social movements oriented toward altering incumbents’ ability to set rules.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The architecture of markets, 2001, p. 16

“The new Christian ideal of life did not at first alter the outward forms of art, but did alter its social function.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

Life, Art

“Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 183

“The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in "some ideas for free from time recording" by Emit Records (1995) https://archive.is/20130628060534/www.emit.cc/img/catalog-page9.jpg

People, Nature, Time

“I think it was when I got to the butterflies -- in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death and technology -- that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Close Encounters http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62470-2002Apr4, Washington Post (April 7, 2002) <br class="br">On reading Rocket Man by Ray Bradbury

Life, Death, Pleasure, Beauty

“There are times when a company’s know-how, product range, and labor relations are in harmony with the world around it. The business situations are familiar, the company is well organized, and employees are trained and prepared. During those times, managers do not need to develop and implement new ideas. Their job is to allocate resources to promote growth and development, channeling capital and people to the parts of the organization best positioned to benefit from the current state of affairs. Those parts of the organization then become larger, better established, and more powerful.
But just when the company has organized itself, outside circumstances may change. New technologies come on the scene, markets shift, interest rates fluctuate, consumers’ tastes change, and the company must enter a new phase of life. In order to stay in sync with the outside world, it must be able to alter its marketing strategy, its product range, its organizational form, and where and how it does its manufacturing. And once a company has adapted to a new environment, it is no longer the organization it used to be; it has evolved. That is the essence of learning.”

Arie de Geus (1930) Dutch businessman

Cited in: Richard C. Huseman, Jon P. Goodman (1998), Leading with Knowledge: The Nature of Competition in the 21st Century. SAGE Publications, p. 72.
The Living Company, 1997

Life, People, World, Idea

“The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

War, Idea

“No act of the terrorists will change our purpose, or weaken our resolve, or alter their fate. Their cause is lost; free nations will press on to victory.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Mission Accomplished (May 2003)

Fate, Change, Victory

“The title that has consecrated this Alter is the Marriage of Souls, and the Golden thread that tyes the hearts of all the world; I tell you, Madam, Freindshipp is beyond all relations of flesh and blood, because it is less materiall.”

John Evelyn (1620–1706) writer, gardener and diarist

The Life of Mrs. Godolphin (London: William Pickering, 1847) pp. 20-21
Often misquoted as "Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world."

Marriage, World, Soul, Heart

“The laws of thought are natural laws with which we have no power to interfere, and which are of course not to be in any way confused with the artificial laws of a country, which are invented by men and can be altered by them. Every science is occupied in detecting and describing the natural laws which are inflexibly observed by the objects treated in the Science.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Introduction, Lesson I: Definition and Sphere of the Science.
Elementary Lessons on Logic (1870)

Men, Law, Way, Nature

“The change from one stable equilibrium to the other may take place as the result of the isolation of a small unrepresentative group of the population, a temporary change in the environment which alters the relative viability of different types, or in several other ways…”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, p. 102.

Way, Change

“Novelist Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park as a screenplay option for the Steven Spielberg flick. I am ambiguous about Crichton’s body of work, as it includes dubious anti-scientific elements. But I can’t be too upset about a fellow who includes me in the acknowledgements of his bestselling novel. I ended up doing some preliminary studies of Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus for the movie(s). These were significantly altered by Spielberg and Stan Winston and his effects team for copyright purposes. In the film, some of my skeletals show up posted on Sam Neill's (ak. a. Dr. Grant's) trailer wall. I was accidentally responsible for the avian term 'raptor' being improperly applied to dromaeosaurs. In another Hunteria paper and PDW, I synonymized Deinonychus with Velociraptor, which Crichton picked up on and shortened into the convenient handle 'raptor'. The movie was okay, but I will never forgive them for presenting Brachiosaurus as such a heavy limbed clunker. I had nothing to do with that. I thought it was too bad the potentially omnivorous brachiosaurs – which were unlikely to have been as placid as cattle – missed the opportunity to snarf up the bratty kids when they were up in the tree.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part IV http://gspauldino.com/part4.html, gspauldino.com

Forgiveness, Tree, Study

“Almost everywhere and at all times the saying of St. Augustine aptly described the situation: "et paupera et inops est ecclesia — the Church is poor and helpless." The Church was powerful only when the state wanted it to be so or when pious laymen had a burning desire to make it so. In the Middle Ages especially the Church was sedulously oppressed: Popes were frequently imprisoned, made the pawns of secular rulers, persecuted, ridiculed, besieged, plundered, exiled, imprisoned and insulted. What about Canossa? People forget how the story ended, and the words of Gregory VII on his death-bed in exile: "Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem, propterea morior in exilio [I loved justice and hated injustice, therefore I die in exile]." Finally there came the Babylonian Captivity at Avignon. It is true that all of this looks quite different in the elementary schools of Kazachstan, in McKinley High and to our intellectuals, whose grasp of history is almost nil.
The situation altered very little in the nineteenth century. Once again there was a prisoner in the Vatican, Pius IX, whose body the mob yelling "Al fiume la carogna!" wanted to throw into the Tiber. This brings us to the twentieth century: Mexico City, Moabit, Dachau, Plötzensee, Auschwitz, Struthof, Carcel Modelo, Andrássy-út 66, Sremska Mitrovica, Vorkuta, Karaganda, Magadan, Lubyanka, Ocnele Mare — these are the modern Stations of the Cross of our clergy. (Pg 128)”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

The Timeless Christian (1969)

Love, Death, Hate, People

“After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action. We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern (1966)

People, Confidence, Problem, Silence

“In the second or so it had taken that bullet to leave its muzzle and penetrate my father's heart, between the pressure of that finger on the trigger and my father's soundless roar, somewhere in that infernal compression of decision, action, and consequence, I was forever altered.”

Antonella Gambotto-Burke book The Pure Weight of the Heart

Source: The Pure Weight of the Heart (1998), P. 25.

Decision, Heart

“Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without. Here is a youth hard pressed by poverty and labor; confined long hours in an unhealthy workshop; unschooled, and lacking all the arts of refinement. But he dreams of better things; he thinks of intelligence, of refinement, of grace and beauty. He conceives of, mentally builds up, an ideal condition of life; the vision of a wider liberty and a larger scope takes possession of him; unrest urges him to action, and he utilizes all his spare time and means, small though they are, to the development of his latent powers and resources.
Very soon so altered has his mind become that the workshop can no longer hold him. It has become so out of harmony with his mentality that it falls out of his life as a garment is cast aside, and, with the growth of opportunities which fit the scope of his expanding powers, he passes out of it forever.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Visions and Ideals

Life, Youth, Beauty, Dreams

“Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me…”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 25 : Return Voyage

World, History, Thinking, Chance

“The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators.
Goodnow contends that the civil service reformers persuasively argued that the separation of administration from politics, far from destroying the democratic links with the people, actually served to enhance democracy. While John Rohr, in his outstanding new introduction carefully notes loopholes in the theoretical scaffold of Goodnow's argument, he is also careful to express his appreciation of the pragmatic ground for this new sense of government as needing a partnership of the elected and the appointed.
Goodnow was profoundly influenced by European currents, especially the Hegelian. As a result, the work aims at a political philosophy meant to move considerably beyond the purely pragmatic needs of government. For it was the relationships, the need for national unity in a country that was devised to account for and accommodate pluralism and diversity, that attracted Goodnow's legal background and normative impulses alike. That issues of legitimacy and power distribution were never entirely resolved by Goodnow does not alter the fact that this is perhaps the most important work, along with that of James Bryce, to emerge from this formative period to connect processes of governance with systems of democracy.”

Frank Johnson Goodnow (1859–1939) American historian

Abstract, 2009 edition:
Politics and Administration (1900)

People, Democracy, Sense, Partnership

“I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me…it is something I cannot alter.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Saltaire, Yorkshire (25 February 1974), quoted in Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 709
1970s

Parting

“[M]any of us came… through a tradition in Western writing that harkens back to and Richard White may have made environmental history "the coolest history around"… but they didn't invent it…. For many writers in the twentieth century, from Webb to the 1937 Committee on the Future of the Great Plains to Frank and Deborah Popper, the Great Plains are the ultimate proving ground of environmentalism's doomsday predictions for the Modernist experiment in a massively altered landscape.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

History, Future

“Graves: When copying the “Dialogues”…why would the :Protocols” alter “coups d'etat: to “revolution”?
Raslovlev: Obviously it was to address the Tsar’s concern over a Russian revolution, eh?”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.80

“World Health organices have speech of body and mind and spirit as total health. But I am altering these words and putting mind, body and spirit. According to me, very little mind is in the body, but the whole body is in the mind. It is mind all that matter, body will follow the mind, mind will never follow the body”

Hira Ratan Manek (1937)

The lecture in Ashland, Oregon (8th of July 2005)

Health, World

“Their permanent presence [of the old traditional paintings out of the past] compels us to produce something different, which is neither better nor worse, but which has to be different because we painted the Isenheim Alter [of Grünewald, 14th century] yesterday.... the better we know tradition – i. e., ourselves and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we will make similar, and the better things we will make different.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 107, note 60

Past, Painting

“Bertrand Russell once pointed out that ‘People are more unwilling to give up the word “God” than to give up the idea for which the word has hitherto stood’. Evolutionary theory may not persuade everyone to give up the word. However, to the extent that it encourages people to alter its meaning beyond recognition, it could be argued that God has nonetheless been a casualty of Darwin’s theory.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 136

God, People, Idea

“Jean Jacques Rousseau," he answered, "is nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey…. For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

J.-J. Rousseau, répondit-il, n'est à mes yeux qu'un sot, lorsqu'il s'avise de juger le grand monde; il ne le comprenait pas, et y portait le cœur d'un laquais parvenu... Tout en prêchant la république et le renversement des dignités monarchiques, ce parvenu est ivre de bonheur, si un duc change la direction de sa promenade après dîner, pour accompagner un de ses amis.
Vol. II, ch. VIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Fools, Understanding, Heart, Joy

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from Moore's letter, (15 Jan. 1955); as cited in Henry Moore on Sculpture: a Collection of the Sculptor's Writings and Spoken Words, ed. Philip James, MacDonald, London 1966, p. 250
1940 - 1955

Pain, War, Feeling, Idea

“It must not be forgotten that the rules of Courts of equity are not, like the rules of the common law, supposed to have been established from time immemorial. It is perfectly well known that they have been established from time to time — altered, improved, and refined from time to time. In many cases we know the names of the Chancellors who invented them.”

George Jessel (jurist) (1824–1883) British politician

In re Hallett's Estate (1880) 13 Ch.D. 696, 710.

Law, Time

“The challenge is shifting our appreciation: being willing to give up some of dad’s money for more of dad’s love. And, in the process, altering the psyche that makes him lovable.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 238.

Love, Money

“I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 7: General View of the Remainder of My Life (p. 167)

Falseness

“Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

Source: Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do With Law and Why It Matters, 2001, p.11

People, Behavior

“Okay, time for me to rain on this parade. I didn’t know he had kids. Young kids. This alters the mix considerably. This makes him an asshole. Cops and firemen, to name but two, place their lives on the line every day to protect others. There was nothing Steve Irwin was doing that he could not have done—as did, say, David Attenborough—without putting his life at risk. This takes this from tragedy to stupidity, and, worse, irresponsibility.”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=14104&PN=1&totPosts=25
On the death of Steve Irwin, "The Crocodile Hunter"

Life, Stupidity, Time

“The Netanyahu government was chosen lawfully, in alliance with the rules of democracy. Those who cry out: "They've deprived us of our country," are, well, no more than crybabies. The rules of democracy haven't been broken. No one has altered the rules, not even the bastards. Yes, but the fact that a government is chosen lawfully, abiding by the rules of democracy, doesn't necessarily mean that the country will be run as a law-abiding state and that democracy will be protected from those who try to undermine and destroy it, including the government itself and the prime minister himself, with his own bare hands.”

Yoel Esteron (1954) Israeli journalist

Who's for destroying democracy? (14-02-2016)

Law, Democracy, Cry, Country

“We shall now conclude our remarks on the opinions entertained before the Christian era… the observation of the present course of nature presented too many proofs of alterations continually in progress on the earth to allow philosophers to believe that nature was in a state of rest or that the surface had remained and would continue to remain unaltered.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 22
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Nature

“With all due respect, many in the entertainment industry are deep into mind-altering substance abuse, and when one’s logic and intellectual calculating powers are replaced with dopey feel-good, fantasy-driven denial, the democratic party serves them well.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

On why entertainment celebrities tend to favor the Democratic Party, as quoted in "Ted Nugent blasts Matt Damon on Palin" in The Christian Science Monitor (18 September 2008) http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/09/16/ted-nugent-blasts-matt-damon-on-palin/

Feeling