Quotes about transformation
page 13

Vivek Agnihotri photo
Patrick Henry photo
Adolf Hitler photo
Paul Krugman photo
Vladimir Putin photo
Charles Stross photo

“If we know each other’s history, we will be able to see parallels in this history. If the black students knew about the Jazz Quarter and the incredible historic events, I bet they would feel a certain pride. And the Central Americans would understand that there was a transformation and maybe have a little respect. Perhaps then there would maybe be more conversation between them. But if we don’t find those parallels, there’s going to be an incredible war.”

Helena Maria Viramontes (1954) American writer

On how people might benefit from learning each other’s history in “The Excavation of Identity as a Political Act: A Conversation with Helena Maria Viramontes” https://www.sampsoniaway.org/interviews/2017/01/24/the-excavation-of-identity-as-a-political-act-a-conversation-with-helena-maria-viramontes/ in Sampsonia Way (2017 Jan 24)

Martín Espada photo
Bernie Sanders photo

“We are going to transform this country and finally create an economy and a government which works for all of us, not just the 1 percent. The underlying principles of our government will not be greed, hatred and lies. It will not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious bigotry. This campaign will be based on justice—on economic justice, on social justice, on racial justice, on environmental justice.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Quoted in: Bernie Sanders kicks off 2020 campaign in Brooklyn, The New York Post, Khristina Narizhnaya and Eileen AJ Connelly, https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/bernie-sanders-kicks-off-2020-campaign-in-brooklyn/ (2 March 2019)
2010s, 2019, March 2019

Karl Kautsky photo
Mary McCarthy photo
J. Howard Moore photo
J. Howard Moore photo
Moni Ovadia photo
Michel Foucault photo

“By power… I do not understand a general system of domination exercised by one element or one group over another, whose effects… traverse the entire body social… It seems to me that first what needs to be understood is the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to the domain wherein they are exercised, and that are constitutive of its organization; the game that through incessant struggle and confrontation transforms them, reinforces them, inverts them; the supports these relations of force find in each other, so as to form a chain or system, or, on the other hand, the gaps, the contradictions that isolate them from each other; in the end, the strategies in which they take effect, and whose general pattern or institutional crystallization is embodied in the mechanisms of the state, in the formulation of the law, in social hegemonies. The condition of possibility of power… should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Par pouvoir… je n’entends pas un système général de domination exercée par un élément ou un groupe sur un autre, et dont les effets, par dérivations successives, traversaient le corps social tout entier… il me semble qu’il faut comprendre d’abord la multiplicité de rapports de force qui sont immanents au domaine où ils s’exercent, et sont constitutifs de leur organisation ; le jeu qui par voie de luttes et d’affrontements incessants les transforme, les renforce, les inverse ; les appuis que ces rapports de force trouvent les uns dans les autres, de manière à former chaîne ou système, ou, au contraire, les décalages, les contradictions qui les isolent les uns des autres ; les stratégies enfin dans lesquelles ils prennent effet, et dont le dessin général ou la cristallisation institutionnelle prennent corps dans les appareils étatiques, dans la formulation de la loi, dans les hégémonies sociales. La condition de possibilité du pouvoir… il ne fait pas la chercher dans l’existence première d’un point central, dans un foyer unique de souveraineté d’où rayonneraient des formes dérivées et descendantes ; induisent sans cesse, par leur inégalité, des états de pouvoir, mais toujours locaux et instables. Omniprésence du pouvoir : non point parce qu’il aurait le privilège de tout regrouper sous son invincible unité, mais parce qu’il se produit à chaque instant, en tout point, ou plutôt dans toute relation d’un point à un autre. Le pouvoir est partout ; ce n’est pas qu’il englobe tout, c’est qu’il vient de partout.
Vol. I, p. 121-122.
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Giordano Bruno photo
Aimé Césaire photo
Alhazen photo

“Whosoever seeks the truth will not proceed by studying the writings of his predecessors and by simply accepting his own good opinion of them. Whosoever studies works of science must, if he wants to find the truth, transform himself into a critic of everything he reads.”

Alhazen (965–1038) Arab physicist, mathematician and astronomer

He must examine tests and explanations with the greatest precision and question them from all angles and aspects.
Ehsan Masood, Science and Islam https://www.amazon.com/Science-Islam-History-Icon/dp/1785782029/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544708566&sr=1-3&keywords=ehsan+masood p: 169

William Quan Judge photo
Karl Barth photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
James Gustave Speth photo

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.”

James Gustave Speth (1942) American environmental lawyer and advocate

[Crockett, Daniel, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html/Nature, Connection Will Be the Next Big Human Trend, Huffington Post, Aug 22, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20160105052014/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html, January 5, 2016, yes]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez photo
Naomi Klein photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Leopold Kronecker photo
Baruch Spinoza photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Mark Satin photo

“The New World Alliance … was a short-lived precursor of the North American Greens. It was founded by Mark Satin (author of New Age Politics) after a nationwide Delphi-type survey among 500 academics, policy experts, and political activists interested in this emerging political paradigm. These new colleagues … were also exploring the relationship between personal and political transformation.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

"Preface." In Woolpert, Stephen; Slaton, Christa Daryl; and Schwerin, Edward W., eds. (1998), Transformational Politics: Theory, Study, and Practice. State University of New York Press, p. xi. ISBN 978-0-7914-3945-6. Woolpert had been a member of the Alliance, see p. xi, and Slaton had worked with the Greens, see McLaughlin quote below.
New Age and Green activism

Christian Dior photo
Rekha photo
C. V. Raman photo

“C. V. Raman was the first to recognize and demonstrate that the energy of photon can undergo partial transformation within matter. I still recall vividly the deep impression that this discovery made on all of us….”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Albert Einstein on Ramana quoted from Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern Indian Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

Kamal Haasan photo
Konstantin Chernenko photo

“You know, comrades, that Konstantin Ustinovich has been gravely ill for a long time, and has been in the hospital in recent months. On the part of the Fourth Main Department, all necessary measures were taken in order to treat Konstantin Ustinovich. But the illness did not submit to the cure, it started to weaken his systems first slowly, and then faster and faster. It became especially aggravated as a result of pneumonia in both lungs, which Konstantin Ustinovich developed during his vacation in Kislovodsk. There were periods when we succeeded in alleviating the lung and heart insufficiencies, and during those periods Konstantin Ustinovich found enough strength to come to work. Several times he conducted Politburo sessions, and put in work days, although shortened ones. Emphysema of the lungs and the aggravated lung and heart insufficiency had worsened significantly in the last two or three weeks. Another, accompanying illness had developed—chronic hepatitis, i. e. liver failure with its transformation into cirrhosis. The cirrhosis of the liver and the worsening dystrophic changes in the organs and tissues led to the situation where not with standing intensive therapy, which was administered actively on a daily basis, the state of his health gradually deteriorated. On March 10 at 3:00 p. m., Konstantin Ustinovich lost consciousness, and at 19:20 death occurred as a result of heart failure.”

Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985) Soviet politician

Yevgeni Chazov, spoken in a special session of the Central Committee one day after Chernenko died.

Andrea Dworkin photo
Ernest Mandel photo
Alex Miller photo

“The merging of different motif areas in her drawings and the transformation of spacial relationships into flat correspondences gathers towards a distortion of depicted reality and the dissolution of its phenomenal form.”

I didn't try to reach the sense of this. I understood the point of it was to transpose the locus of authority from the works to the discussion of the works. The writer had assumed the role of validating authority for the images he discussed. In order to do this he had been required to transform what he saw with his eyes into ideologies that he could 'see' with his intellect.
Page 18.
The Ancestor Game (1992)

Khalil Gibran photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice -- for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not -- involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life, than the smaller commonwealths of antiquity.”

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up pp. 230-233

Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Abdullah Öcalan photo

“Family is not a social institution that should be overthrown. But is should be transformed. The claim of ownership over women and children, handed down from the hierarchy, should be abandoned.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, pp. 79

Anton Chekhov photo

“To a heart transformed by love, it is a mandolin.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act II
The Cherry Orchard (1904)

Simone de Beauvoir photo
Huey P. Newton photo
Chekawa Yeshe Dorje photo

“When all the world is filled with evil, transform adversity into the path of enlightenment.”

Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1102–1176) Buddhist meditation master

Seven Points of Mind Training

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“Because we have not understood the brain's ability to transform pain and disequilibrium, we have dampened it with tranquilizers or distracted it with whatever was at hand.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

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

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“Conflict, pain, tension, fear, paradox... these are transformations trying to happen. Once we confront them, the transformative process begins.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

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

Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Dana Arnold photo
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani photo
China Miéville photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo

“Transformation is no longer lightning but electricity. We have captured a force more powerful than the atom, a worthy keeper of all our other powers.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

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

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“In this century we have seen into the heart of the atom. We transformed it—and history—forever. But we have also seen into the heart of the heart.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

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

Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo

“New breakthrough technologies can make it easier, but we've already got, right now, everything we need to accomplish the task of transforming our energy economy away from fossil fuels. Except the willingness.”

Greg Craven American teacher and writer

Appendix (p. 218)
What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate (2009)

Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Halldór Laxness photo
G. K. Chesterton photo
Ellen Brown photo

“Money might... indeed become a servant of humanity, transformed from a tool of oppression into a means of securing common prosperity. But first the central bank needs to become a public servant. It needs to be made a public utility, responsive to the needs of the people and the economy.”

Ellen Brown (1945) American writer

The Fed’s “Emergency Measures” Are Becoming the New Normal, TruthOut https://truthout.org/articles/qe-forever-the-feds-dramatic-about-face/ (27 February 2019)

Alex Grey photo

“Writing is a transformative act and writing the occult, which I interpret as writing what’s invisible, or apparently invisible, is inevitably connected to writing my desire as a woman…”

Ariana Reines (1982) American writer

On writing as a woman in “INTERVIEW WITH ARIANA REINES” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-ariana-reines/ in The White Review (July 2019)

Tenzin Gyatso photo
Mikhail Gorbachev photo
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson photo
Alicia Garza photo

“So we know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire."”

Alicia Garza (1981) Co-founder of the Black Lives Matter International movement

An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter, Ted Talks, https://www.ted.com/talks/alicia_garza_patrisse_cullors_and_opal_tometi_an_interview_with_the_founders_of_black_lives_matter?language=en (October 2016)

Prevale photo

“The night dresses us with magic, leaving us free to dream, travel, interpret everything with the depth of our soul. The power of thought and will transform desire into reality.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La notte ci veste di magia, lasciandoci liberi di sognare, viaggiare, interpretare tutto con la profondità della propria anima. La forza del pensiero e di volontà, trasforma il desiderio in realtà.
Source: prevale.net

Prevale photo

“The power of thought and will transform desire into reality.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La forza del pensiero e di volontà trasforma il desiderio in realtà.
Source: prevale.net

Prevale photo

“Live day by day and always keep your head up high, transforming your heart every day.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Vivi giorno per giorno e avanza sempre a testa alta trasformando ogni giorno come desidera il tuo cuore.
Source: prevale.net

“Sometimes people think that it’s a very simple matter to become a Catholic, that it’s like changing your uniform, that’s not the way it is. It requires a profound transformation at so many levels.”

Jeffrey N. Steenson (1952) American bishop

Leader of Anglican ordinariate recalls joy of first year https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/leader-of-anglican-ordinariate-recalls-joy-of-first-year (November 27, 2012)

David Cay Johnston photo

“America has been transformed from a land of growing economic plenty into a hollow shell.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

The Fine Print (2013)

Felix Adler photo