22 Quotations Found

Here’s the thing, however, about radical change. It is, as our more numerate readers might say, a “high-variance strategy,” meaning that the range of possible outcomes is far wider than what we might expect from more incremental, within-the-system change.

Perhaps we nail the jackpot and manage to hit upon the political choices that really can create something meaningfully better out of a broken system. But … [ Read more ]

Author: Bryan Walsh | Sources: MSN, Vox | Subjects: Change, Concepts, History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

We can’t choose where we come from, but we can choose where we are going.

Author: Stephen Chbosky | Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

History is shaped by two types of minds: one that sees things in new and creative ways, and without traditional limitations; and one that sees things in the same, limited ways, as countless others have done in the past.

Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, History

Wanting to change is as much about our wanting, and how we describe it, as it is about the changes we want. Getting better means working out what we want to get better at.

Author: Adam Phillips | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Myriad unchosen variables, from genetic and cultural inheritance to accidents and natural disasters, constrain our capacity for change. But beyond this question of whether and how we can choose our transformation is the question of what transformation to choose at all — a fundamental question of self-knowledge, riddled with all the ways in which we are fundamentally opaque to ourselves.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Change is often a consequence of, and a coping mechanism for, the contradictions we live with — an attempt at greater cohesion.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

The profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

I am not sure what is more difficult — the heartache of enduring a change made against your will and without your consent, which is the foundation of all loss, or the inner turmoil of having to make a necessary change yourself, breaking the momentum of patterns propelled by a lifetime’s motive force, which in turn presupposes the loss of a familiar way of being, … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

The gap between knowing what you want and going after it is where fear thrives. You don’t need enough courage for the entire journey. You only need courage for the next step.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” In the … [ Read more ]

Author: Jimmy Carter | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Change, Communication, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

A good cause is often injured more by ill timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.

Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

If the best way to predict the future is to invent it, the second-best way is to finance it.

Author: John Doerr | Subjects: Business, Change, Concepts, Life & Society

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

Author: Mother Teresa | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

A revolution is any change that alters the power structure. This [Fourth Industrial Revolution] is not a revolution. It’s a reformation, because it bolsters the existing power structure. The rhetoric of revolution is a cover-up.

Author: Gianpiero Petriglieri | Subjects: Change, Concepts, History, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.

Author: John Kenneth Galbraith | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

The desire to control change is the greatest obstacle to wisdom.

Author: Ram Dass | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years. And [we] underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Author: Bill Gates | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Author: Buckminister Fuller | Subjects: Change, Concepts

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower | Subjects: Change, Concepts, History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Where self-advancement cannot, or is not allowed to, serve as a driving force, other sources of enthusiasm have to be found if momentous changes, such as the awakening and renovation of a stagnant society or radical reforms in the character and pattern of life of a community, are to be realized and perpetuated.

Author: Eric Hoffer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Leadership, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior