Quotes About Political Change

#1. Design is both a political and cultural force for change, although most designers choose not to think about the power it has.

Jonathan Barnbrook

#2. All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Marshall McLuhan

#3. I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit - audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change.

Camille Paglia

#4. The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco- populism . Ecopopulism ... To change our laws and culture , the green movement justice , political solutions and social change.

Van Jones

#5. Conservative Denyers and Delayers are the main reason America lacks the consensus and the political will to take up the fight against catastrophic climate change.

Joseph J. Romm

#6. In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

Kathy Acker

#7. We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense.

H.G.Wells

#8. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

William S. Burroughs

#9. One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.

Bell Hooks

#10. I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Joseph Brodsky

#11. To change a political system, the majority of the thinking citizens must unite, speak with one voice and stand firm like one leg.

Ahmed Padia Binkatabana

#12. I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people's lives.

Eduardo Paes

#13. I don't feel passionately about politics, i'm not a political person. Is it easy for me to get fired up about someone's position on climate change? No, it's not. On most of these issues, I can see both sides.

Rachel Maddow

#14. The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

Harold Macmillan

#15. The whole point of all of this - why we are here, why the world is here, and why we have the political system and leaders that we do - is to achieve change. This is the purpose of life.

Yehuda Berg

#16. The protestors feel that the elections have been hijacked and the choices are between two corrupt parties - that when the power structure no longer represents the people, the vote is no longer a tool for change [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].

Catie Marron

#17. ... move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

Bell Hooks

#18. But it is not our place to punish a father for his political beliefs or where he wants to raise his child. Indeed, if we were to start judging parents on the basis of their political beliefs, we would change the concept of family for the rest of time.

Janet Reno

#19. Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves.

Krishnamurti

#20. I don't think you can work on feelings in politics, apart from anything else, political change can come very unexpectedly, sometimes overnight when you least expect it.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#21. Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while.

Emma Goldman

#22. Multiplied - the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with - in some cases they became horrifyingly more.

Harper Lee

#23. As the prevailing voices in the public spotlight are predominantly men, stepping into the spotlight with the truth of who you are as a woman is political change.

Tabby Biddle

#24. No change in the balance of political parties can alter the general determination that no class should be excluded from contributing to and sharing responsibility for the state.

Gustav Stresemann

#25. Use the KEY to change: Knowledge Empowers You!

Andrew Kreig

#26. Believe in better, which is a corporate phrase rather than a political phrase. We don't want more. We're not looking for quantity. We're looking for quality. Believe in better suggests intergenerational change. It suggests product innovation. It suggests something better for the future.

Frank Luntz

#27. Increasingly gang violence and organized crime, together with climate change-driven natural disasters, are displacing more people as wars are fewer on the continent and political violence has decreased considerably, the NRC has decided to treat this as a humanitarian crisis.

Jan Egeland

#28. The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

Douglass North

#29. [Dagley] had also taken too much in the shape of muddy political talk, a stimulant dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse.

George Eliot

#30. philosophers of difference are, in fact, hyperethical and radical political thinkers, concerned with how movements that seek to address marginalization need to become even more ethical, even more radical in their desire to change the status quo in view of justice.

Matthew Calarco

#31. Great upheavals produce shock waves that widen cracks in political, economic, and security orders. Sometimes the old orders break. Yet it can be in the power of leaders and peoples to shape the directions of change.

Robert Zoellick

#32. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.

Michelle Alexander

#33. Whenever anybody gets involved in politics, its always exciting for me because we take for granted our freedoms and our abilities to effect change through political activism.

Emily Saliers

#34. Sometimes one man must fight for what he feels is right, even against the majority. Something that is wrong does not change to right just because the majority approves it, ignores it, or the government says it is right. It is still wrong.

Kenneth Eade

#35. There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty.

John Boyd Orr

#36. [Mitt Romney is a] Massachusetts moderate who, in fact, is pretty good at managing the decay." He's "given no evidence in his years in Massachusetts of any ability to change the culture or change the political structure.

Newt Gingrich

#37. Conservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.

Woodrow Wilson

#38. Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.

Glenn Greenwald

#39. Lord X was a tyrant, not a revolutionary. He wanted to take over the system, not change it.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#40. Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.

Lucy Parsons

#41. [Hillary] Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.

Bernie Sanders

#42. Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

Jose Saramago

#43. You have to understand that to have a revolution when you are 18 years old is completely different from normal political leaders who were born in a democracy and will die in a democracy and never to have experienced that change. I have seen that change.

Jose Manuel Barroso

#44. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all

Thomas Kuhn

#45. Major political parties have a role, but they are incapable of initiating fundamental change because they are fundamentally tied to the status quo. They are the status quo.

Marianne Williamson

#46. Politicians would be well advised not to hold their breath for youth to engage in politics any time soon. Today's youth are the first generation to have realized for real change to occur, it must happen on an individual level rather than at an administrative level.

James Morcan

#47. When people align around shared political, social, economic or environmental values, and take collective action, thinking and behavior that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change.

Simon Mainwaring

#48. Architecture is a political act, by nature. It has to do with the relationships between people and how they decide to change their conditions of living.

Lebbeus Woods

#49. The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political ... And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.

Wim Wenders

#50. Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

Bell Hooks

#51. We have got to change the political culture in America. We need a political revolution. That means we are working on politics not just three weeks before an election but 365 days a year.

Bernie Sanders

#52. Using political tools to change social conditions won't work.

Ziggy Marley

#53. And let me say this as a politician I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.

Barack Obama

#54. The enemy is not individuals, churches, 'ex-gay' organisations or political parties; the enemy is ignorance. Change is created by focusing our energies on overcoming the latter instead of attacking the former.

Anthony Venn-Brown

#55. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Karl Marx

#56. You don't bring about major political change simply by changing people's minds. It's their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

Terry Eagleton

#57. The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.

Malcolm X

#58. It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world.

Lester B. Pearson

#59. There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

Robert Heilbroner

#60. True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home. The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.

Barack Obama

#61. Certainly Amadeus because it was a very powerful time for me, we filmed it in the Czech Republic at a time of lots of social and political change going on in that part of the world.

Jeffrey Jones

#62. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.

Emma Goldman

#63. See how (for instance) the cultural can be freed from the tyranny of the natural; gender from biology; how social change has occurred, and how it can change again; how to reveal and defend (without fetishizing) cultural difference; how to make visible the 'political unconscious' of our culture.

Jonathan Dollimore

#64. The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.

Jurgen Habermas

#65. The separation of religion from the practical affairs of society is a convenient doctrine for those who fear that social change would threaten of modify their own political and social self-interest.

William Stringfellow

#66. You have to believe that it's through politics that societies can lead social and economic and political change.

David Miliband

#67. Republican theory clearly stated that the people held all political power, and only they could delegate authority to a government. The people were free to change governments at will. They didn't need permission from incumbents.

James D. Best

#68. I worry about international terror as a method for bringing about political change or sociological change in different countries. And this concerns me because our homeland is not immune from this kind of dastardly attack. And so I worry about that a lot.

George H. W. Bush

#69. Political and social change is always a stagger-step process. One step forward, two steps back. They want you to give up.

Hal Sparks

#70. I'm not a 'messiah' coming to change Washington. I don't come with a political background, so I think it's part of my responsibility to raise my hand and say 'Why?' Folks don't just want smaller government; they want an efficient small government.

James Lankford

#71. As life speeds up & the political becomes ever more personal democracy continues to foster change as fast as the movement of tectonic plates

Dean Cavanagh

#72. There are ways to pursue political change. In a democracy, it's through the ballot box. There are other ways, and many democracies have many different systems of democracy.

Richard Armitage

#73. As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded, giving full reign to the fickle fortunes of war.

Charles Emmerson

#74. Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.

Louis D. Brandeis

#75. The Arab spring confirmed that peaceful change is possible and so reinforced the vision of political Islam. The impact of this went beyond the Brotherhood to include the Salafist tendency in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya that had questioned the democratic path.

Wadah Khanfar

#76. The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.

Noam Chomsky

#77. My parents are left-wing, and I would describe myself as that. But also, you know what? I wouldn't describe myself as that. Because I don't have to. Because I'm not a political party. Most people are a little bit of each, and we change our mind on various issues.

Daniel Radcliffe

#78. We can and we must build the political power to change the course of history - our survival depends on it.

Wenonah Hauter

#79. When I was 5, my father was very much my hero. And he ran for political office in a very thankless campaign for a very thankless position. And he did it because his mother had instilled in him, if you are someone who has the capacity to make a great change, you have the responsibility.

Howard Warren Buffett

#80. All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

Leo Strauss

#81. That's a deep change in priorities. People are much less political today. They have found other values of life. We are developing normal attitudes, a normal set of priorities. We are growing out of our childhood.

Tom Segev

#82. It is a fact that fewer than 10 percent of Germany's population of 79.7 million people actively worked or campaigned to bring about Hitler's change.17 Even at the height of its power in 1945, the Nazi political party boasted only 8.5 million members.

Andy Andrews

#83. In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the 'vertical dimension' of faith and the 'horizontal dimension' of love for one's neighbor and political change.

Jurgen Moltmann

#84. It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

Christopher Hitchens

#85. Many environmental battles are won by delaying a destructive project long enough to change the conversation - to allow new economic, political and social dynamics to emerge.

Frances Beinecke

#86. Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early '90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

Zac Goldsmith

#87. Besides, many Islamic movements will change as soon as they gain political responsibility. I'm not at all pessimistic in this regard. Just think of Turkey, where the Islamists are now behaving like a sort of Christian Democratic party in Europe.

Zalmay Khalilzad

#88. I still lack a political, religious, and philosophical world view. I change it every month, so I'll have to limit myself to the description of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.

Anton Chekhov

#89. I try not to change my political point of view from paper to paper.

Jonathan Shapiro

#90. Women need to see ourselves as individuals capable of creating change. That is what political and economic power is all about: having a voice, being able to shape the future. Women's absence from decision-making positions has deprived the country of a necessary perspective.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#91. We're clearly coming to the end of the fossil fuel era. We have the technology to shift to renewable energy, we have the will of the people. The only thing that's keeping us back is the fossil fuel industry's hold on our political system. That's what we need to change.

Mark Ruffalo

#92. Political leaders are reflection of our society.

Sukant Ratnakar

#93. Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.

Serj Tankian

#94. 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

#95. For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone's control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff.

Arthur Miller

#96. You don't choose a party because it's the flavour of the month. I feel I will be able to work under a political system. I feel if people like me don't enter politics to bring change, who will?

Nandan Nilekani

#97. In the American political lexicon, 'change' always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.

Ron Paul

#98. I find that the great majority of public servants across the entire political spectrum come because they believe in the United States and they want to change the world.

Condoleezza Rice

#99. If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.

George Papandreou

#100. It is simply the truth that the political system that I am part of has degenerated to the point that it needs fundamental change.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo