Quotes about change

I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision.”

“The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire.

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs.

To think of that as something bad was merely to think in terms of what had once been and no longer existed.

Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.

Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.

Change scares people. Makes them dangerous.

Then change the world. Give it a soul.

Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?

“When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.”

What gave you the absurd idea that [the world]’s broken?

“It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.”

[...]

Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.

“The multitude,” Cavendish says, “is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down—for the novelty of the thing.”

HOW TO READ A BOOK

1. READ IT

2. CHANGE A LOT

3. REREAD IT

"The trouble is," he said, "is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so." (p. 124)

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he wanted things to stay the same, as well. (p. 315)