When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long enough time, certain things happen. They become mythological, and they become very, very powerful. They create conformity. They intimidate.

 –E.L. Doctorow

Whatever you do, don’t give up. Because all you can do once you have given up is bitch. I’ve known some great bitchers in my time. With some it’s a passion; with others, an art.

–Molly Ivins

Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as “sentimental,” “impractical,” or “womanish” … by those whose fun, profit, or convenience was at stake.

–Joan Gilbert

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

 –Richard Nixon

Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.

–Jesse Jackson

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present will certainly miss the future.

–John F. Kennedy

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 must we think anew and act anew.

–Abraham Lincoln

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

–Leo Tolstoy

If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.

–Carl Jung

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

–Lao-Tzu

If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.

–W.L. Bateman

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

 –Anne Morrow Lindbergh

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

–Andy Warhol

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

 –Mohandas Ghandi

 

It is important to do what you do not know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.

 –Carlos Castenada