1,097 Quotes Regarding Change


A new system is a hard thing to put into place, it is opposed by those that would be disadvantaged by the new system and it receives no support from those that would benefit.
Niccolo Machiavelli

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the leadin the introduction of a new order to things.
Niccolo Machiavelli

They change, and we, who pass like foam,<
John Masefield

Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin.
Denise McCluggage

The problem is not whether business will survive in competition with business, but whether business will survive at all in the face of social change.
Laurence Joseph McGinley

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
Henry Miller

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
Lewis Mumford

Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long.
Ogden Nash

Ducking for apples; change one letter and it's the story of my life.
Dorothy Parker

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck

Keep what you have; the known evil is best.
Titus Maccius Plautus

Deploring change is the unchangeable habit of all Englishmen.
Richard Postgate

In ecology, as in economics, TANSTAAFL(There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. Failure to recognize the 'no free lunch' law causes the buffalo hunter mentality syndrome the unthinking assumption that there will always be plenty because there always has been plenty.
Dr. Robert W. Prehoda

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Marcel Proust

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson

The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith. (Decision against Galileo)
Roman Congregation

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it.
Carl T. Rowan

Change is one thing, progress is another. “Change” is scientific, “progress” is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Bertrand Russell

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.
Sallust

All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer