Top 100 Quotes About Change In History
#1. Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
A.J.P. Taylor
#2. Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.
Thomas Friedman
#4. You keep plugging away
that's the way social change takes place. That's the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.
Noam Chomsky
#5. Sylvi wished she could gouge out the look in Dorogin's stony eyes, and change the course of history. She wished Fthoom had been eaten by a sea monster.
Robin McKinley
#6. It would change everything, gentlemen. It would shift the entire balance of power in Europe-maybe the world. Alexander conquered half of it. Think what he would have done with arrows dipped in monster snot!
Rick Yancey
#7. But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#8. I knew German history well, and out of my experiences in the rest of the world I believed to know the German kind; therefore I never doubted that, although for the time being all indications were against it, one day a change would come.
Gustav Krupp
#9. We are the "can do" country. We adjust to situations better than any people in the history of the world ... We adjust to change.
Dan Rather
#10. Whatever the reason, the fact is that there was no widespread catechetical teaching for Christian children. Things were going to change. The growing awareness of the need for Christian education was one of the chief forces behind the desire in the sixteenth century to reform the rite of baptism.
Hughes Oliphant Old
#11. When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.
Tom Morello
#12. All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.
Ira Sachs
#13. What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Sacks
#14. History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick
Edward Hallett Carr
#15. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#16. In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
Richard M. Nixon
#17. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#18. Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#19. Ignorance and its denial will, sad to say, lead us down the same road as it did in all past history.
Jordan Maxwell
#20. For decades, this great leader, often at Dr. King's side, was denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. No medal can change that, but today, we honor Bayard Rustin's memory by taking our place in his march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love.
Barack Obama
#21. Social conditions that spur large numbers of people into action are ignored in favor of a Hollywood version of history focusing on one conquering hero. Since a movement for social change is embodied in its leader, death of the leader means death of the movement.
Patricia Hill Collins
#22. Never question the power of one! Throughout history it has been the actions of only one person who has in inspired the movement of change.
Steve Maraboli
#24. Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth
Desmond Tutu
#25. Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there's every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq.
Robert Baer
#26. My administration will be more supportive of the good works done here than any administration in the history of this country because I understand the power of faith, that faith can change lives.
George W. Bush
#27. The Christ event did not in that sense CHANGE the will of God, but rather it more clearly expressed God's eternal will toward the whole of history.
Thomas C. Oden
#28. I'm not a historian, and I wouldn't want to be. I want to change the world. Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my stories and you'll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power. The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always will.
Terry Deary
#29. Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.
Margaret Thatcher
#30. The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.
Mao Zedong
#31. Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.
Carl Andre
#32. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.
Cate Blanchett
#33. As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
William Gibson
#34. Are we amateurs and not professionals? We know the lessons of history, we know the mistakes and we either act accordingly or collapse. Salvation lies in clarity and the courage to implement change
Thomas S. Power
#35. The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history.
Stephen Covey
#36. Violence is not the answer, it doesn't work any more. We are at the end of the worst century in which the greatest atrocities in the history of the world have occurred ... The nature of human beings must change. We must cultivate love and compassion.
Martin Scorsese
#37. The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
Felix Frankfurter
#38. Always history is being made; opinions attitudes and institutions change, and there is evolution in the nature of capitalism
Frank Knight
#39. There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.
Oswald Mosley
#40. The nationalist regrets the change; an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.
C.V. Wedgwood
#41. Perhaps for the first time in history, human-kind has the capacity to create far more information than anyone can absorb; to foster far greater interdependency than anyone can manage, and to accelerate change far faster than anyone's ability to keep pace.
Peter Senge
#42. Rapid change of conditions in all human affairs bring unexpected results.
William C. Oates
#43. Since periods of great change, such as the present one, come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.
Dalai Lama
#44. History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.
Jill Lepore
#45. As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count.
Aberjhani
#46. Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it.
Ian Bogost
#47. I strongly believe that at this point in America's history, we need a president that will not just continue basically the policies we have been following in recent years. I think we need a transformational figure. I think we need a president who is a generational change.
Colin Powell
#48. We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
R.D. Laing
#49. Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.
David Harvey
#50. From the theft of confidential cables to 21st-century protest movements, to development breakthroughs that have the potential to change millions of lives, we are all in uncharted territory.
Hillary Clinton
#51. The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times.
Paula Gunn Allen
#52. To change our realities, we also have to change our myths. As history amply demonstrates, myths and realities go hand in hand.
Riane Eisler
#53. Christians should be ready for a change because Jesus was the greatest changer in history.
Ralph Abernathy
#55. As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter ...
Margaret Atwood
#56. It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,
Gertrude Stein
#57. We live in a complicated society, Bromley - one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering?
P.J. Parker
#58. There are people who desperately want to change the world.
I wonder if it could be measured, because the world is already
in the state of continuously change since the beginning of time.
Or they may just want their names etched nicely on men history.
Toba Beta
#59. Our best days are in front of us. We can reform those entitlements, we can change that corporate tax code and lower it. We can put America back on track on a growth level and a growth rate that we've never seen in the history of this country.
Rick Perry
#60. Was there a turn, a change in the atmosphere? To single out a particular moment is to distort the record, for it suggests a clear history of cause and effect that can only betray our sense of what really happened.
Steven Millhauser
#61. A lot of things in history change over time.
Jeb Bush
#62. Knowing how to deal with change effectively is a primary requirement for living successfully in perhaps the most exciting time in all of human history
Brian Tracy
#63. Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.
David Malouf
#64. I also think that there is a strong streak of racism, and whenever we engage in foreign adventures. Our whole history in regime change has been of people of different color.
Ed Asner
#65. More than any other time in history, the 1990s will be a turning point for human civilization.
David Suzuki
#66. I was always anti-marriage. I didn't understand monogamy. I couldn't figure out how that could last. And then I met Bryn and I started to understand the beauty of constancy and history and change and going on the roller coaster with someone - of having a partner in life.
Maria Bello
#67. We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history- a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world.
Willis Harman
#68. Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colors to all.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#69. History has shown that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did, in fact, dramatically change the balance of the court in many critical areas, such as abortion, the privacy debate expansion and child pornography.
Sam Brownback
#70. We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.
Andrea Dworkin
#71. In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.
Cameron Russell
#72. It's a very exciting time in the history of this country, to even see people responding to a different way of doing business and really wanting to make a change.
Susan Sarandon
#73. But there was something else that I discovered in Madrid. It had more to do with the spirit than it did with knowledge and yet it was something I could hope to hand on. A change in method or technique accounts for many things in human history.
Wilder Penfield
#74. The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise - and occasionally the application - of the view that all people, and not just one's own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.
James Q. Wilson
#75. The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
Howard Zinn
#76. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.
Wade Davis
#77. If you look back at British history, women being allowed to play sport in schools meant they had to change their clothing. They couldn't be running around in their long skirts and corsets, because you can't.
Clare Balding
#78. There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.
Andy Grove
#79. You told me once that history matters, but it's frozen, set in stone. This is part of our history. I can't change it or undo it. But it doesn't have to dictate our future.
Cora Carmack
#80. 'Years of Living Dangerously' is a wonderful opportunity to reach a lot of people with the story and importance of climate change in our lives; in recent history, there's no bigger threat to the quality of human life than what is taking place right now in respect of climate change.
Harrison Ford
#81. The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history.
Margaret Atwood
#82. Names of regions and countries change over time, and it is sometimes common to refer to ancient lands using names assigned to them later in history. However, this linguistic custom has typically been practiced only in the absence of other known and acceptable names for the places in question.
Shlomo Sand
#83. Yet, thousands of africans and young african youths have failed to acknowledge the significant of what madiba gave them. To me, he be called the pride in black skin and the freedom we are enjoying
Victor Adeagbo
#84. There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change.
Edward Witten
#85. People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.
Erica Jong
#86. Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history.
Steven Johnson
#87. In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy.
Laurence Lafore
#88. Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.
Elliott Abrams
#89. The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley
#90. Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a "Death of a Thousand Cuts." In other words one grand act is not occuring but a multitude of small expressions on the part of individuals, both slowly and swiftly taking the place of heirarchy and history.
William Gibson
#91. Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.
Peter Drucker
#92. It is the first time in the history of Rwanda that political change in the highest leadership of the country has taken place in peace and security.
Paul Kagame
#93. Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public
and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history.
Charles Krauthammer
#94. More material progress has been made during the past one hundred and fifty years under the American system of business enterprise than during all the preceding centuries in world history. This record of achievement is a challenge to those who would radically change that system.
Karl Taylor Compton
#95. For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own. [ ... ] Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged
character of our people, and on their faith.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#96. Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life.
Mary Roach
#97. We consider it vital that the community of nations be drawn together in an orderly, disciplined, rational way to review the history of our global environment, to assess the potential for future climate change, and to develop effective programs.
George H. W. Bush
#98. In every era, there are only one or two moments when nations come together and reach agreements that make history, because they change the course of history.
Gordon Brown
#99. We men should be ashamed of ourselves. I think 85 percent of men are dangerous to women. We need to change to a values system nested in compassion and generosity, and women have carried that torch throughout history.
Patch Adams
#100. Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better.
Cory Doctorow
