Social Change Quotes - Page 4

• Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

  Rebecca West

  Men, Civilization, Reform

  Rebecca West (2010). “The New Meaning of Treason”, p.182, Open Road Media

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• Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

  Faye Wattleton

  Class, Effort, Revolution

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• There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals.

  Winona LaDuke

  Hands, Fairy, Individual

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• The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

  Andy Stern

  Roles, Movement, Social

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• Social change comes through people.

  Paul Watson

  People, Social

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• Trade unions have been an essential force for social change, without which a semblance of a decent and humane society is impossible under capitalism.

  Pope Francis

  Essentials, Unions, Impossible

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• It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics.

  Wayne Swan

  Artist, Long, People

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• ...move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

  Bell Hooks

  Life Changing, Moving, Creating

  bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.194, Routledge

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• Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.

  Emma Goldman

  Moving, Expression, Law

  Address to the Jury, delivered 9 July 1917, New York

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• The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

  Adrienne Rich

  Believe, Poetry, Trying

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Architecture was, or is, a kind of hobby, an inclination I have to fiddling around and building things. Putting up shelves or cupboards, or making tools, or designing houses ... it always has a functional or social motivation. If social changes are in the air, I am gripped immediately by the desire to build, and I think that I accelerate or anticipate changes in my life by doing so, at least in draft. In the case of my house, that was anticipation: in other words, first build, then change one's life.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Motivation, Thinking

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change.

  Paul Rogat Loeb

  Believe, Men, Fire

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• Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Enough, Individual, Social

  Elizabeth Janeway (1981). “Powers of the weak”, William Morrow & Co

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• For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.

  William Ernest Hocking

  Views, Law, Light

  "Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights". Book by William Ernest Hocking, Preface (20 May 1926), p. vii, 1926.

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• ...no movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component'....Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Animal, May, Revolution

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• Each situation has to be evaluated separately, for all are different. In general, I believe in non-violent direct action, which involve organizing large numbers of people, whereas too often violent uprisings are the product of a small group. If enough people are organized, violence can be minimized in bringing about social change.

  Howard Zinn

  Believe, Direct Action, Uprising

  ZNet forum reply, May 26, 1999.

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• The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.

  Margaret Mead

  Strong, Sex, Children

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• Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

  Karl Marx

  Sex, Progress, Ugly

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• We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!

  Stewart Brand

  Technology, Garden, Age

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• William Wilberforce...w as a great man who impacted the Western world as few others have done. Blessed with brains, charm, influence and initiative, much wealth ... he put evangelism on Britain's map as a power for social change, first by overthrowing the slave trade almost single-handed and then by generating a stream of societies for doing good and reducing evil in public life... To forget such men is foolish.

  J. I. Packer

  Blessed, Men, Evil

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• All social change begins with a conversation.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Social, Conversation

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• Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism. Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

  Emma Goldman

  Real, Law, Direct Action

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.44, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today.

  James Bryant Conant

  Education, Country, Teacher

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• So much history can be lost if no one tells the story -- so that's what I do. I tell the stories. This is my way of fighting for social change.

  Alanis Obomsawin

  Fighting, Stories, Way

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• When your focus is social change and not financial change why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared. If you're a pioneer and you come up with something that can change the world and you turn round and say 'I'm not going to share this idea with anyone' then you only impact the few and not the many.

  Cameron Sinclair

  Ideas, Impact, Focus

  "Quotes of the day: Cameron Sinclair", www.cnn.com. July 11, 2008.

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