Top 100 Quotes About Social Change
#1. Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
Eve Ensler
#2. [On social change:] What I say is that if one country is annexed by another, its nationality is not changed overnight. Social processes are often very, very slow.
Margaret Case Harriman
#3. Practically every violent conflict or social change has proved that violence unleashes violence in return.
Petra Kelly
#4. What business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to social change. They are the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up, and remake the world for the better.
David Bornstein
#5. If we define society as a human community, then the transformation of individual attitudes and values represents meaningful social change.
Leslie Weisman
#6. Sometimes losses in life are not losses at all. They are simply the evidence God provides, in order to build a story so profound, that it will cause social change.
Shannon L. Alder
#7. All long-term social change comes from the successful efforts of one or another struggling organizations to capture the minds of a hard core of future leaders.
Gary North
#8. I believe that reappropriation can be a powerful tool for creating social change. Sometimes, things like irony, satire, or humor are more effective in getting at difficult truths or concepts like white privilege, orientalism, and the exoticization of culture.
Simon S. Tam
#9. Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.
Faye Wattleton
#10. If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Salman Rushdie
#11. The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#12. Social change really cannot happen unless people are willing to take a risk, and they were. And I was so moved by that, and of course by the way that he spoke, that made a huge dent in my belief system and my spirit.
Joan Baez
#13. But as the late socialist politician Tony Benn would often put it, social change is a combination of two things: 'the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world'.
Owen Jones
#14. But to conservatives whose value system gives priority to Moral Strength, the problem of drugs is the personal lack of the moral strength to just say no. It is a problem of personal values, not of social change or drug treatment centers.
George Lakoff
#15. Before 'Schindler's List,' I wouldn't have believed movies had a lot of power for social change.
Liam Neeson
#16. You can use principles of the free market to drive social change.
Leila Janah
#17. Corporations wield enormous power in society.In order to see lasting social change, leaders in the private sector must begin to think of their own business plans as plans for good as well as profit. That's not such a big leap.
Darren Walker
#18. As a civil rights leader, Mrs. King's vision of racial peace and nonviolent social change was a fortifying staple in advancing the civil rights movement.
James T. Walsh
#19. Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.
John Podhoretz
#20. If people can be convinced to pick up dog sh*t, who knows what social change is possible?
Franke James
#21. Social change isn't something you should do just to help pad a resume. Follow your passion.
Nancy Lublin
#22. This is how social change ultimately happens: enlightened values do not change behavior; the contours of self-interest are altered and new values rush into the vacuum.
William Powers
#23. Most leaders are indispensable, but to produce a major social change, many ordinary people must also be involved.
Anne Scott
#24. One paper boasted that its subscription and advertising numbers proved that America did not need the social change it rival paper advocated.
Harold Holzer
#25. Social change can be seen as a mosaic, taking that which is broken and creating something new.
Terry Tempest Williams
#26. The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies wth a vision of social change which challenges class elitism.
Bell Hooks
#28. I definitely believe that art is the best way to produce social change.
Pedro Reyes
#29. So much history can be lost if no one tells the story
so that's what I do. I tell the stories. This is my way of fighting for social change.
Alanis Obomsawin
#30. Silence is the enemy of social change.
Marc Bekoff
#31. The spirituality that we need to develop for social change is one that mobilizes us for social change.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#32. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#33. [S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.
Peter Conrad
#34. The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.
Patricia Hill Collins
#35. The future is our responsibility, but change will not take place until the majority loose confidence in their dictator's and elected officials' ability to solve problems. It will likely take an economic catastrophe resulting in enormous human suffering to bring about true social change.
Jacque Fresco
#37. The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.
Emma Goldman
#38. Kids automatically teach each other how to use technology, but they're not going to teach each other about the history of democracy, or the importance of taking their voices into the public sphere to create social change.
Howard Rheingold
#39. We need a revolution in the West: not violent overthrow, but a willingness to take responsibility for the course of history being set forth in our names. We need a revolution determined to activate broad, inclusive social change.
Christina Baldwin
#40. No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It's because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand - demand - demand change.
Joe Biden
#41. I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change. I am far lazier than that.
Jon Stewart
#42. Because language and society are so closely linked, it is possible, in some cases, to encourage social change by directing attention towards linguistic reflections of aspects of society that one would like to see altered.
Peter Trudgill
#43. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.
Howard Zinn
#44. Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.
Robert Reich
#45. I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
Penelope Lively
#46. Every person that steps up and commits to social change helps solidify the black movement cause. It is not easy for those who fill in the leader role.
Assata Shakur
#47. When we see the human race, we must see before all else environment and food. Historians write about social change without taking these factors into account. This is why it is difficult for them to see the reasons decline and prosperity in society.
Michio Kushi
#48. When the dominant images of a culture are anticipatory, they "lead" social development and provide direction for social change.
Fred Polak
#49. Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.
Andrew Vachss
#50. I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.
Paul Krugman
#51. We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.
Wenonah Hauter
#52. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
Cesar Chavez
Address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984
Cesar Chavez
#53. I have long been convinced that families are the primary agents of social change in any society.
Elise M. Boulding
#54. One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly . When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change.
Robert Gilpin
#55. The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.
Gloria Steinem
#56. 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
#57. Everyone says you've got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
Bill Drayton
#58. I entered medicine to use it as a vehicle for social change.
Patch Adams
#59. I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.
Andre Dubus III
#60. The question remains: which brands will commit to creating a private sector pillar of social change, and which will become casualties of their own outdated thinking?
Simon Mainwaring
#61. Unless we as social change agents come from a certain kind of spirituality, we're likely to create more harm than good.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#62. Through the Fellows Program, Acumen Fund prepares future global leaders with the tools necessary to drive significant social change.
Jacqueline Novogratz
#63. We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!
Stewart Brand
#65. This document and scores similar to it were at the foundation of cultural, political and social change throughout the ages. Secret brotherhoods with one credo: to know, to dare, to be silent.
Art Johnson
#66. If you care about real change, deep structural change, that involves politics, and all politics is friction. It takes leadership, and the willingness to create that friction, that leads to social change.
Nick Hanauer
#67. Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.
Margaret Mead
#68. Looking out at this quarter of a million people, ... I truly believed, at that moment, it was possible that human beings could join together to make a positive social change.
Mary Travers
#69. There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.
Bell Hooks
#70. Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.
Steve Winwood
#71. There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals.
Winona LaDuke
#73. Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
Terry Tempest Williams
#74. There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.
Cornel West
#75. My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .
Aldous Huxley
#76. Social change doesn't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation, beating, or indeed, baring of breasts, but rather through negotiation.
Shereen El Feki
#77. The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.
Stockwell Day
#78. Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
Quentin Crisp
#79. When a woman has the opportunity to speak truth to power, it's important that she does, even if it's just trying to get a crosswalk in her neighborhood. That's how social change happens!
Kirsten Gillibrand
#80. What's distressed me, and I think is one of the major reasons we get recurrent intensifying crises, is we seem to have lost our capacity for outrage. And it's only people getting outraged that produces really positive social change.
William K. Black
#81. I think no matter how you think about your music, you're ultimately in the music 'business.' I think you have to be business-minded in some sense. And for me, the real goal ... is positive intention and social change through music. It doesn't mean that can't turn a profit.
Mary Lambert
#82. Capitalism is the most powerful tool for positive social change.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#83. 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
#84. Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur ...
Elizabeth Janeway
#85. Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.
Robert Wright
#86. Missing from such histories are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change.
Howard Zinn
#87. The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?
Andy Stern
#88. 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
#89. Economic change is always accompanied by social change. No one can stop that.
Lisa Kleypas
#90. You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.
Bell Hooks
#91. If we work for social change - and it is good to do such things - let us always do it with an awakened heart big enough for all. There is no enemy; there is only ignorance. There is no one to hate, only many to love.
John Kehoe
#92. No movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component' ... Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out
Ingrid Newkirk
#93. Questions about God's existence, self disclosure, saving action and almighty power reminded me of my inadequacies. For me the theo in theology had become little more than a question mark. I could confidently discuss philosophy, psychology and social change, but God made me uneasy.
Thomas C. Oden
#94. Social change involves helping people see new options for making life wonderful that are less costly to get needs met.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#95. And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work.
Andy Stern
#96. Political and social change is always a stagger-step process. One step forward, two steps back. They want you to give up.
Hal Sparks
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. We need to make fun of and ridicule the media images that seek to keep us down, divide us against each other by age, class, and race, and insist that we spend so much psychic energy on our faces, clothes and bodies that nothing is left for ideas, social change, or politics.
Susan Douglas
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