I'm a quotation addict, so this was an excuse to create a file of quotations on CHANGE. So here's a big batch, wherein you get to read what a few hundred some wise folk say about change--

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I'm a quotation addict, so this was an excuse to create a file of quotations on CHANGE. So here's a big batch, wherein you get to read what a few hundred some wise folk say about change--

 

If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.
Anonymous

Never change horses in mid stream.
Proverb

No matter how far you have gone on a road, turn back.
Proverb, Turkish

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
Geoffrey F. Abert

Just because the solutions of problems are not visible at any particular time does not mean that those problems will never be alleviated or confined to tolerable dimensions. History has a way of changing the very terms in which problems operate and of leaving them, in the end, unsolved, to be sure, yet strangely deflated of their original meaning and importance.
M. I. Abramowitz

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present we can save the best of the past.
Dean Acheson, address to Law Club of Chicago, 1-22-1937

Controbersial proposals, once accepted, soon became hallowed.
Dean Acheson, speech, Independence MO, 3-31-1962

If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever.
Douglas Noel Adams

When a man you like switches from what he said a year ago, or 4 years ago, he is a broad-minded person who has courage enough to change his mind with changing conditions. When a man you don't like does it, he is a liar who has broken his promises.
Franklin P. Adams

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
Maya Angelou

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.
Hannah Arendt

CHANGE, ADAPTATION, LAW, GOVERNMENT, REVOLUTION
Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.
Aristotle 384-322BC N E

No nation, no social institution ever acquired coherence without some sort of a fight. Out of the fight come its myths and its heroes.
Thurman Arnold

Men believe that a society is disintegrating when it can no longer be pictured in familiar terms. Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
Thurman Arnold

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Saint Francis of Assisi

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing.
Lady Nancy Astor

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
Marcus Aelius Aurelius

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
Francis Bacon

It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one.
Sir Francis Bacon

CONSERVATISM, CHANGE, BELIEFS, PARADIGMS
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invluable at first and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.
James Arthur Baldwin

When you are through changing, you are through.
Bruce Barton

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
Claude Bernard

I have always argued that change becomes stressful and overwhelming only when you've lost any sense of the constancy of your life. You need firm ground to stand on. From there, you can deal with that change.
Richard Nelson Bolles

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.
Hal Borland

It is only an error in judgement to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered.
Christian Bovee

CHANGE, GROWTH, ON THE ROAD
I ain't what I'm gonna be.
I ain't what I wanna be.
But thank God, I ain't what I was.
Les Brown

PLANNING, HISTORY, CHANGE, PAST
"You can never plan the future by the past."
Burke, Edmund, Letter to member of national Assembly

We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.
Jimmy Carter, in his 1-20-1977 inaugural address, quoting his high school teacher Julia Coleman

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castaneda

To remain young one must change
Alexander Chase

If you cry "Forward" you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions.
Anton Chekhov

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Sir Winston Churchill

Turbulence is a life force. It is opportunity. Let's love turbulence and use it for change.
Ramsay Clark

Open your eyes! The world is still intact.
Paul Claudel

The challenges of change are always hard. It is important that we begin to unpack those challenges that confront this nation and realize that we each have a role that requires us to change and become more responsible for shaping our own future.
Hillary Rodham Clinton

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come and gone. It's time for change in America.
William Jefferson Clinton

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
Confucius

I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a 'transformer' in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.
Stephen R. Covey

If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.
Philip Crosby

...I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. Indeed, I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for with the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified. This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences. On the other hand, I am not very sceptical,�a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science. A good deal of scepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men, who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable.
Charles Darwin

PERSISTENCE, DETERMINATION, PERSEVERANCE
Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
Leonardo da Vinci

ACTION, DECISION
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.
Robyn Davidson

Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn't about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.
Miles Davis

JOURNEY, STEPS, TURNING POINTS,
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
John Dewey

Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incomptetents in asylums, who can't are those in cemeteries.
Everett McKinley Dirksen

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
William O. Douglas

The important thing is this; to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Charles Du Bos

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
Marian Wright Edelman

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
Albert Einstein

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
Albert Einstein

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
Marian Wright Edelman

Life is a lways at some turning point.
Irwin Edman

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
Albert Einstein

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Emerson

CHANGE< STABILITY, SACRED
"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
Life is a series of surprises. we do not guess the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being. Of lower states,,, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

VARIETY
"Gladly we would Anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand.
...Our love of the Real draws us to Permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and Sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious."
Emerson

All is change; all yields its place and goes.
Euripedes

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.
Marilyn Ferguson

"I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there."
Richard Phillips Feynman

"It is not strange ... to mistake change for progress."
Millard Fillmore

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

"The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth."
Harry Emerson Fosdick

"One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the essence of life."
Anatole France

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Anatole France

"He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world."
Benjamin Franklin

The moreal world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
Sir James Frazer

"Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough, and it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor."
Robert Lee Frost

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.
John Kenneth Galbraith

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!
Andre Gide

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
George Gilder

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand

"Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better."
Sydney J. Harris

"People change and forget to tell each other."
Lillian Hellman

"If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic."
Hazel Henderson

Everything flows, nothing stays still.
Heraclitus

It is in changing that things find purpose.
Heraclitus

Every new adustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
Eric Hoffer

The consistent thinker ...is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.
Aldous Huxley

History warns us... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions
T. H. Huxley

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James

PARADIGM, CHANGE, REVOLUTION
First a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James

The world does not have to change...
The only thing that has to change is our attitude.
Gerald Jampolsky

NEED, SATISFACTION, FULFILLMENT
"Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labour and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other: such are the changes that keep the mind in action: we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit."
Johnson

None are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.
Samuel Johnson

Everything changes but change itself.
John F. Kennedy

The one uncangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
John F. Kennedy

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
Robert F. Kennedy

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.
Tuli Kupferberg

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
Max Lerner

If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.
Kurt Lewin

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change, what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.
G. C. Lichtenberg

JOURNEY,
One must lose one's life in order to find it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There are no birds in last year's nest.
Longefellow, It Is Not Always May

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. vi

Someday change will be accested as life itself.
Shirley MacLaine

All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.
Karl Marx

When you forgive, you in no way change the past - but you sure do change the future.
Bernard Meltzer

They have only stepped back in order to leap farther.
Montaigne

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change for happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.
Charles Langbridge Morgan

Society can only pursue its normal course by means of a certain progression of changes.
John, Viscount Morley of Blackburn

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

Continuity in everything is unpleasant.
Blaise Pascal

Change does not change tradition. It strengthens it. Change is a challenge and an opportunity, not a threat.
Prince Phillip of England

All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.
Marcel Proust

SYMPTOM SUBSTITUTION, CONVERSION
"There are relapses in the distempers of the soul, as in those of the body: What we take for a cure, is most commonly nothing but an abatement, or a change of disease."
\193 La Rochefoucauld

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Carl Rogers

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Bertrand Russell

He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never e able to change reality.
Anwar Sadat

CHANGE, CHAOS, ACTION, CREATE, JUXTAPOSE
Just to stir things up seemed a great reward in itself.
Sallust, 86-35 BC, Catiline

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.
George Sand

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the reasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

Changes are not predictable; but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
Gail Sheehy

Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate their subject matters.
B. F. Skinner

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any momemnt taking place in it.
Herbert Spencer

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
Laurence Sterne

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders
Rabindrath Tabore

We must learn to view change as a natural phenomenon-to anticipate it and to plan for it. The future is ours to channel in the direction we want to go... we must continually ask ourselves, "What will happen if..." or better still, "How can we make it happen?"
Lisa Taylor

However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Henry David Thoreau

BASICS CHANGE HUMANITY POLITICS, TRANSIENCE, IMPORTANCE
The improvements of ages have had little influence on the essential laws of man's existence.
Thoreau

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor
Arnold Toynbee

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain

Change is the only evidence of life.
Evelyn Waugh

All the changes taking place in medicine today are consumer driven.
Andrew Weil

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major avances in civilization are processes which all but wrech the societies in which they occur...
Alfred North Whitehead

Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
Alfred North Whitehead

To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.
Woodrow Wilson

Even god cannot change the past.
Agathon, (446-401 BC)

Change in all things is sweet.
Aristotle (384-322 BC)

CHANGE, PERMANENCE
Saint Augustine 354 430
Things that are not immutable are not at all.
Saint Augustine

CURIOSITY, IMAGINATION, IMAGERY, VISUALIZATION, RESEARCH
"God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe, and desirous to receive it as the eye to receive the light; and thus it is not only pleased with the variety and vicissitudes of things, but also endeavors to find out the laws they observe in their changes and alterations. And if such be the extent of the mind, there is no danger of filling it with any quantity of knowledge."
Bacon, Francis; Advancement of Learning, 1605

CHANGE, INNOVATION
He that will not apply new remedies , must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
Bacon Essays; Of Innovation

We must change in order to survive.
Pearl Bailey

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.
James Baldwin - American author


Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.
Joel Barker

ACTION, CHANGE
I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
Wizard of Oz movie (adapted from L. Frank Baum's series of books)

Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them?
Ashleigh Brilliant
UC Berkeley 'street' philosopher

"...the magnitude of change we sense around the world compels us to look within ourselves and to God to forge a rare alloy of courage and restraint.
George HW Bush, "7/10/89

EXCESS, SURFEIT, SATIETY, SENSATION SEEKING
"With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe,
And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below."
Byron: Child Harold, Canto 1, st. 6

CHANGE, YINYANG, DEATH, HIBERNATE
So when some dear joy loses
Its beauteous summer glow,
Think how the roots of roses
Are kept alive in the snow."
Alice Cary (1820 1871

Time is a changeable ally.
Winston Churchill, Broadcast, 1940

VICTORY, WINNING
The natural goal of every single plan of campaign is the point at which the offensive changes into the defensive. To go beyond this goal is more than simply a useless expenditure of power, yielding no further result; it is a ruinous one which causes reactions, and these reactions, according to universal experience, have always disproportionate effects.
Karl Von Clausewitz 1780 1831

COPING, STRESS, STABILITY, SINEWAVE, CHANGE
"Be not elated by fortune, be not depressed by adversity."
Cleobulus

CHANGE
We live in a world where what you earn depends on what you can learn, where the average 18 year old will change jobs eight times in a lifetime, and where none of us can promise any of you that what you do for a living is absolutely safe from now on.
Bill Clinton, 1992 2nd presidential debate

It is only the wisest and the stupidest that cannot change.
Confucius

The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million.
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are usually right.
Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) - American socialist, activist, unionist, 9-12-1918, addressing jury at his sedition trial

In a progressive country change is constant, change is inevitable.
Benjamin Disraeli
- from a speech on the Reform Bill of 1867, Edinburgh, October 29, 1867,

Change starts when someone sees the next step.
William Drayton

CHANGE
"Change is the nursery of music, joy, life and Eternity."
Donne, John ,1572 1631/hl

IDEAS, CHANGE
Men scorn what they don't understand.
Sir Arthur COnan DOyle 1859 193 The sign of Four

CHANGE, CONVERSION
If the cask is to hold the wine, its water must first be poured out.
Meister Eckhart

ACTION
You really can change the world if you care enough.
Marion Wright Edelman

VARIETY
"Gladly we would Anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand.
...Our love of the Real draws us to Permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and Sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious."
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals entry, 1840

CHANGE, CREATIVITY
Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. Forster

Serious illness leaves no aspect of life untouched. Your relationships, your work, your sense of what life is and ought to be these all change, and the change is terrifying.
Arthur W. Frank, Reflections on Illness 1991

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, The Affluent Society, 1976

It is an axiom of statesmanship, which the successful founders of tyranny have understood and acted upon, that great changes can best be brought about under old forms. We, who would free men, should heed the same truth. It is the natural method. When nature would make a higher type, she takes a lower one and develops it. This is the law also of social growth. Let us work by it. With the current we may glide fast and far. Against it, it is hard pulling and slow progress.
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Time changes every man. Unusual circumstances change them in unusual ways.
Bryant Gumbel 2 26 93

The transformations of this century are not merely a matter of historic events; there is no day on which history will leap from necessity to freedom. There is rather a molecular process, composed of millions and even billions of personal decisions, whereby, men and women assert their will to take control of their own destiny.
Michael Harrington, Fragments of the Century, 1973

CHANGE, PROGRESS, DISCOMFORT, INVENTION
"The world owes all of its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 1864)

TIME, CHANGE
"You cannot step twice into the same stream. For as you are stepping in, other and yet other waters flow on."
Heraclitus

ACTION, CHANGE
To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change 1964

CHANGE, REVOLUTION
Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.
Abbie Hoffman

CHANGE, RELOCATION, MOVING
The finest flowers are those transplanted; for transplanting means difficulty, a readjusting to new conditions, and through the effort put forth to find adjustment does the plant progress. Transplanted men are the ones who do the things worth while, and transplanted girls are the only ones who inspire a mighty passion.
Elbert Hubbard

CHANGE, NEW
I believe that the aim of the avant garde should be to re discover not invent in their purest state, the permanent forms and forgotten ideals of the theatre. I make no claim to have succeeded in this. But others will succeed and show that all truth and reality is classical and eternal.
Eugene Ionesco

Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
Thomas Jefferson, 5-2-1808, Letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko

Today's truth may not stand as tall, nor at all tomorrow;
But the spirit of its telling should never change.
Kall

If the shoe fits, wear it until it wears out, or seasons or needs change.
Kall

There are many things you CAN do, that you have never done.
Kall

There are many things that CAN be done that have never been done.
Kall

Just because a thing has not been done YET, does not mean it cannot be done.
Kall

PARADIGMS, SUCCESS, PROBLEMS, SOLUTIONS, PERSPECTIVE, CHANGE
Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number.
Thomas S. Kuhn

Peace is neither the absence of war nor the presence of a disarmament agreement. Peace is a change of heart.
Richard Lamm, frmr Gov. of Colorado

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. C. S. Lewis

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Abraham Lincoln, 12-1-1862, his second Message to Congress

ACTION
All the means of action the shapeless masses, the materials lie everywhere about us; what we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into crystal, bright and clear.
Longfellow

There are no birds in last year's nest!
Longefellow, It Is Not Always May, 1841

FLEXIBILITY
"The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions."
James Russel Lowell

"A wise prince should...never remain idle in peaceful times, but industriously make good use of them, so that when fortune changes, she may find him prepared to resist her blows, and to prevail amidst adversity.
Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, Duties of a Prince with Regard to the Militia.

FATE
"Nothing is eternal on the earth below;
And FORTUNE delights in constant CHANGE,
So she may more plainly show her power."
Machiavelli, Capitolo Did Fortuna

ACTION
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. C. S. Lewis

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
Henry Miller

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Reinhold Niebuhr

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr

REVOLUTION, CHANGE
Revolutions are not made; they come.
Wendell Phillips

To say that a thing has never yet been done among men is to erect a barrier stronger than reason, stronger than discussion
Thomas Brackett Reed, 4-12-1878, Speech in House of Representatives

IDEAS
Most new things are not good and die an early death; but those, which push themselves forward, and by slow degree force themselves on the attention of mankind are the unconscious productions of human wisdom and must have honest consideration, and must not be made the subect of unreasoning prejudice.
Thomas Brackett Reed, December, 1902, North American Review

CHANGE, LEADERSHIP, AWAKENING,
It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times
Thomas Brackett Reed, 1839-1902

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Challenge of change, in NY Times Magazine, 7-27-1986

BLUSHING
"With every change his features played,
As aspens show the light and shade."
Scott

FUTURE, STABILITY, CHANGE, ADJUSTMENT,DESIRE, NEED, GREED, MOMENT
"The true felicity of life is to be free from perturbations; to understand our duties towards God and man; to enjoy the present without any serious dependence upon the future. Not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is abundantly sufficient; for he that is so, wants nothing. ... Tranquility is a certain equality of mind, which no condition or fortune can either exalt or depress."
Seneca

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change, we change.
Thoreau, Walden, Ch. XVIII

For every thought supported by feelings, there is a muscle change. Primary muscle patterns being the biological heritage of man, man's whole body records his emotional thinking.
Todd, Mabel Ellsworth The Thinking Body

Conscience is the most changeable of guides.
Vauvenargues 133

GROWTH, LEARNING, EXPERIENCE, FLAWS, ERRORS, CHANGE, EVOLUTION
"The sages do not consider that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his mistakes and continually to make a new man of himself."
Wang Yang Ming (15th century) quoted by Helena Kuo

DISCOVERY, DISAGREEMENT, CHANGE, AUTHORITY, BELIEF
I was taught to ask for proof, that it was good to distrust authority. You need to have the courage to disagree. There are times in your life when you should be a radical.
James D. Watson, 1993, (co discover of the DNA double helix)

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead

CHANGE, RISK, STABILITY, ACTION
Allons! we must not stop here!
However sweet these laid up stores however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here;
However shelter'd this port, and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here;
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us, we are permitted to receive it but a while.
Allons! the inducements shall be greater;
We will sail pathless and wild seas;
We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail.
Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements!
Health, defiance, gayety, self esteem, curiosity
Whitman, Walt, Song of The Open Road

CONSERVATISM, CHANGE, IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
Wilde, In Conversation

"Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change."
Wilde, The Critic as Artist

"How all things Change among men! How what was false
becomes true with the flight of Time."
Voltaire, Essai sur les Moeurs et lesprit des Nations ch 31

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation