In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
—Paul Harvey
Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
—James Thurber
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
—Bertolt Brecht
Sometimes things happen. Things happen even when you don’t intend them to happen. Maybe at the beginning you had good intentions, or intentions you thought were harmless, but before you knew it things got out of your control.
—Dana Reinhardt in Harmless
Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.
—Marcus Aurelius
If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice.
—Noam Chomsky
Nothing stayed, nothing ever changed. But love, only love, that was the true part of the story, no matter what the beginning, middle or end.
—Selena Kitt in Grace
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
—Malcolm X
It was another of those big life-changing moments when you didn’t know what the next ten seconds would bring but you knew that nothing would ever be the same after.
—Sarra Manning in Unsticky
The old futures have a way of hanging around.… Everyone sort of knows that the real future is going to be cluttered with all the same junk we have today, except it will be old and beat up and there will be more of it.
—William Gibson
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
Every government, whatever its form, character, or color—be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi, or Bolshevist—is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.
—Emma Goldman
Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial.
—Tom Robbins
What we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development.
—Franz Kafka
Simone Weil once said, "I would like to achieve the kind of radiance that can bring about nonviolently what other people might have to do violently." And, of course, we see teachers like that. We see parents like that, who have a kind of radiance so that they don't have to raise their voice; they don't have to beat their children.… They simply make a different atmosphere.
—Sissela Bok