Political Change Quotes

Movements in literature were not caricatures - in the sense that they actually functioned as an ideology in politics does. As now a monopolistic ideology in politics prevails in the literature as well a single movement prevails: that of networking as a literary quality. Quality = networking is the magic formula: take a Krijn Peter Hesselink, never managed to score a positive review but reviews are old news: it is only referential authority trickling down from that network pyramid that counts. Thus, nowadays its perfectly possible to be on top of the Pyramid without ever getting a positive review, or - even worse - I even see people rising in literary ranks that have never written any books at all. Ergo, your point that another ideology would make a 'caricature' of literary history is exactly the same reasoning used by neoliberals to deconstruct any political change: another ideology? Impossible, because they no longer exist, only we still exist.

In this way you get a pyramid shape you also see in popular music. It's still the bands from the 70's and 80's who earn the big money. New talent can't really play ball anymore. This of course embedded in a sauce of eternal talent shows, because the incumbent males have to just keep pretending they are everyone's benefactors. In the literature its the same: it is still Pfeijffer that gets the large sums of money from the Foundation of Literature, and it's still Samuel Vriezen pretending that that doesn't matter.

Martijn Benders

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us. ~ Peggy Noonan

Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change. ~ Jerry Brown

Acting alone, minorities can never achieve the majorities necessary for political change. ~ Hillary Clinton

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture. ~ Eve Ensler

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live ... They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them. ~ Shirley Chisholm

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s. ~ Enrique Pena Nieto

What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan was Ho Chi Min's empty suit, which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was the tricky one, the joke. It was Uncle Ho's empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that only a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear. This odd suit suited me, for it was of a cutting-edge cut. Wearing this inside-out suit, my seams exposed in an unseemly way, I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn't the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom - I was so tired of saying these words! - we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation. ~ Gloria Steinem

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will 'take our country back' from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. ~ Matt Taibbi

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey. ~ Terry Eagleton

The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Even in what seem like "unquantifiable" areas like political change and disaster prevention, we can still think rigorously, in an evidence-based manner, about how good those activities are. We just need to assess the chances of success and how good success would be if it happened. This, of course, is very difficult to do, but we will make better decisions if we at least try to make these assessments rather than simply throwing up our hands and randomly choosing an activity to pursue, or worse, not choosing any altruistic activity at all. ~ William MacAskill

The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur. ~ James Bovard

Women in the Arab world have a rich history in their active participation in political change from the Algeria revolution against the French occupation to the most recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya among other countries. The question is not their participation. Their question is the incorporation of women's voices fully in the new definitions of the countries where change has happened. ~ Zainab Salbi

You can have a lot of political "change" in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone's bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn't matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn't have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a political society, although it is rapidly heading toward a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt, are still heavily politicized. Their rulers really do need to be concerned about what people think, so they expend proportionate efforts on controlling freedom of speech.


But I think young people actually innately have fairly good values. Of course it's a spectrum, but they have fairly good values most of the time and they want to demonstrate them to other people, and you can see this when people first go to university. They become hardened as a result of certain things having a payoff and other things not having a payoff. ~ Julian Assange

As the prevailing voices in the public spotlight are predominantly men, stepping into the spotlight with the truth of who you are as a woman is political change. ~ Tabby Biddle

Certainly Amadeus because it was a very powerful time for me, we filmed it in the Czech Republic at a time of lots of social and political change going on in that part of the world. ~ Jeffrey Jones

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies ... Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers. ~ Thomas C. Oden

I've often been told you have to play the game to get what you want, give a little of yourself up to get the results you desire. But what if that's all bullshit? What if every time I put a strip of false lashes on and cross my legs on a talk-show stage, I am not getting any closer to creating the change I want to see in the world? What if every pair of Spanx, every morning-TV-ready joke, every Instagram shout-out to the person who made my dress only carries me farther away from my goal? And the goal is big: radical self-acceptance for women everywhere, political change so total it shakes the ground, justice and joy for those who have been used and tossed aside. And the goal is small: utter and unbridled selfhood. ~ Lena Dunham

Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life. ~ Virginia Postrel

For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change. ~ Mike McCurry

Social and political change is an effect - it comes only after we change ourselves. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

The rise of a hypersexual culture is not proof that we have reached full equality; rather, it has reflected and exaggerated the deeper imbalances of power in our society. Without thoroughgoing economic and political change, what we see when we look around us is not the equality we once sought; it is a stalled revolution. ~ Natasha Walter

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic ~ J.G. Ballard

In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the 'vertical dimension' of faith and the 'horizontal dimension' of love for one's neighbor and political change. ~ Jurgen Moltmann

Change in leadership brands must be influenced and proactively effected at a personal level, it can never be forced from outside with sustainable effectiveness. Saddam Hussein, Muammar al Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak are all political trophies, yet the effects of the military or "civil" initiatives that toppled them, are nothing to be proud of considering what continues to happen in countries like Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria, after the use of force to bring political change. ~ Archibald Marwizi

There are ways to pursue political change. In a democracy, it's through the ballot box. There are other ways, and many democracies have many different systems of democracy. ~ Richard Armitage

Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind. ~ Paul Kriwaczek

So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate. ~ Bernard Baruch

George W. Bush was a very bad president. The Iraq war was a big mistake. The U.S.A. needed a political change. I hoped Barack Obama could be a good president, but I'm disappointed. He hasn't done well. ~ Marc Rich

Multiplied - the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with - in some cases they became horrifyingly more. ~ Harper Lee

In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. ~ Richard K. Morgan

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. ~ Harriet Lerner

The objective of a terrorist is to create political change in the society he targets. ~ Tom Clancy

Organizational Development: The New Christian Right of the 1980s was dominated by paper organizations that were essentially the mailing lists of a handful of politicized ministers. Such organizations were better at issuing press releases than doing the hard work of political mobilization and advocacy. By contrast, the movement of the 1990s has generated a plethora of grass-roots organizations that allocate meaningful responsibilities to individual members. The goal is to create an army of grassroots activists who know how to stimulate political change. ~ Kenneth D. Wald

reflect on the practice of solidarity in their own particular context and situation', and in doing so should help create better understanding in the next generation of committed and passionate advocates of social and political change in Australia. ~ Clare Land

What I'm suggesting is we are going to look back, and we're going to see what happened in Syria, and we're going to see the larger destabilization of the Middle East, the rise of extremism, and we're going to wonder ... Why didn't we at least try to force a political solution - at an acceptable cost to us, because no one is saying we should send in ground troops - and if we did it would be worse than doing nothing ... If we do not act, we are going to look back and wonder why we didn't. ~ Anne-Marie Slaughter

I am proud to be a girl, and I know that girls can change the world, ~ Malala Yousafzai

Actually, I think I come at things a whole different way from most people, and, you know, sometimes political answers are one way to solve the problem, and sometimes there are better ways to do it. ~ Craig Benson

If I knew what I know today, years ago, I wouldn't change a thing about anything. I would not have appreciated what I know today if it hadn't been for what I didn't know. ~ E. Obeng-Amoako Edmonds

The wu in wuxia means both "to cut" and "to stop." It also refers to the weapon - usually a sword - carried by the assassin, the hero of the story. The genre became very popular during the Song Dynasty [960–1279]. These stories often depicted a soldier in revolt, usually against a corrupt political leader. In order to stop corruption and the killing of innocent people, the hero must become an assassin. So wuxia stories are concerned with the premise of ending violence with violence. Although their actions are motivated by political reasons, the hero's journey is epic and transformative - physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In the Tang Dynasty, a prominent poet named Li Bai wrote some verses about an assassin. This is the earliest example I know of wuxia literature. Gradually, the genre gave shape to ideas and stories that had been percolating in historical and mythological spheres. Although these stories were often inspired by real events of the past, to me they feel very contemporary and relevant.

It's one of the oldest genres in Chinese literature, and there are countless wuxia novels today. I began to immerse myself in these novels when I was in elementary school, and they quickly became my favorite things to read. I started with newer books and worked my way back to the earliest writing from the Tang Dynasty. ~ Hou Hsiao-hsien

A river season will last as long as it takes you to reach your new
place. If you get into the river and let it take you where you need to
be, your river season will last an afternoon. But if you fear change
and struggle and hold on to the rocks, the river season will last and
last. It will not end until your body becomes exhausted, your grip
weakens, your hands slide off the rocks and the current takes you to
your new place. ~ Andrew Kaufman

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. ~ William Arthur Ward

Beauty is discernible in your fleeting moments. When you talk; in a smile or a blink of your eye; beauty is discernible. I can feel it in the skin of your nape when I kiss it. You must know how to preserve it for a long time; I do not know how long that would be possible. Many things may change. Many new things may meet your eyes, allure you; you may be corrupted by them. Then? What will you do then? All that has made you beautiful will be gone… ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Lady Kingsley, when you read this, do attempt to keep an open mind."

"I will if you will," she retorted hotly.

To her surprise, he chuckled. "I daresay neither of us will. It's a pity, too, because if we could ever see our way clear to agreeing on a matter, we might accomplish a great deal of good in this world."

It infuriated her that he could pretend to care even one whit for these boys. "Now you've confused me. I'd assumed that your reason for serving on so many charitable boards was to further your political aims. Yet all the time you were merely hoping to accomplish some 'good in this world.' How very astonishing."

Just that quickly, his amusement vanished. "While I don't pretend to be as morally superior as you and your late husband, my intentions are good, no matter what you make of them. It may shock you to learn that those of us with character flaws sometimes do as much good as those of you without. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

I cannot see that keeping the status quo intact would help in any way to solve the problems of inequality or suffering in this world. I would go for taking action towards change instead of accepting the inevitable. ~ Elina Juusola

What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today too, in political argument and in discussion of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the stronger. "Redemption" in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognizable. And it becomes recognizable when God becomes recognizable. He becomes recognizable in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God entered the world and set up the criterion of truth in the midst of history. Truth is outwardly powerless in the world, just as Christ is powerless by the world's standards: he has no legions; he is crucified. Yet in his very powerlessness, he is powerful: only thus, again and again, does truth become power. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories. ~ Debra Dean

MSNBC policy requires journalists to report any potential conflict of interest and to seek approval from the president of NBC News before making any political contribution. ~ Bill Dedman

Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy. ~ William Hazlitt

The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change. ~ William J. Clinton

There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police, there is no other way. ~ George Orwell

Going into Somalia, I didn't anticipate how many people's lives would be affected by it. In hindsight, I certainly wish I had taken more time to think about that, but I can't change it. ~ Amanda Lindhout

The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and
cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism - its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a
technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards. ~ Lisa Duggan

Political commercials encourage the deceptive, the destructive and the degrading. ~ John O'Toole

I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

You know you are addicted to a food if despite knowing it is bad for you and despite wanting to change, you still keep eating it. Addiction means that a craving has more control over your behavior than you do. ~ Kathy Freston

Many of the great world religions teach that God demands a particular faith and form of worship. It should not be surprising that SOME of the people who take these teachings seriously should sincerely regard these divine commands as incomparably more important than any merely secular virtues like tolerance or compassion or reason.
Across Asia and Africa the forces of religious enthusiasm are gathering strength, and reasom and tolerance are not safe even in the secular states of the West. The historian Huge Trevor-Roper has said that it was the spread of the spirit of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ended the burning pf the witches in Europe. We may need to rely again on the influence of science to preserve a sane wolrd.It's not the certainty of the scientific knowledge that fits it for this role, but its UNCERTAINTY. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about the matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious traditions or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience ~ Steven Weinberg

We're all affected by music. It has the power to inspire, uplift us, change our moods, and even alter consciousness. ~ Andrew Weil

The Church is larger than any one nation or any one political scene. ~ Brother Andrew

I don't know ... we seemed to click right away, you know? And he's so kind but determined to protect you and me both, and well, he's nice to look at. Even with the "scar. It's kind of sexy."
I chuckled. "Do you know how that scar got there?"
She giggled. "Yeah. He told me Tristan gave it to him. But it sounded like he deserved it. Jax can be ... well, he's Jax. But I think I love him."
"I'm sure the accent has nothing to do with it." She seemed to have a thing for those.
"Oh, my God. You should hear him talk dirty with that accent of his!"
I clapped my hand over my "mouth to cover a laugh. "I don't want to know that!"
"Yes, you do. Doesn't Tristan ever talk dirty to you in all those different languages he knows?"
Hmm ... funny how I'd never thought about it. He was holding out on me! That would have to change. Next time, I swore I'd make him do it. Whenever next time might be ... ~ Kristie Cook

Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom. ~ Adrienne Rich

Human nature changes when it must change, John Clay. Never sooner. And nothing will change it more than when the survival of an individual group is surpassed by the survival of one's entire species. When your entire human race is threatened with extinction, politics and fighting no longer matter. ~ Michael C. Grumley

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes. ~ Alex Gibney

This book does not try to "document" any particular aspect of Indian life. To me, doing such a thing would seem a pretentious and pseudo-scientific undertaking, especially for someone from the West. The photographs also make no intentional social or political statement. I never say, when discussing my work, that I am "concerned" with anything (another favorite word tossed about, all too much, by young and socially conscious post-modernists). ~ Waswo X. Waswo

I hope it's the good kind of dilemma," Reginald broke Patricia's reverie. "Whatever one you're on the horns of."
...
"I was just thinking," she said. "There are so many scary problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you'd create another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance. We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find another way to handle us."
...
"I am, as you know, a fan of nature," said Reginald. "And yet, nature doesn't 'find ways' to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It's more that nature's playing field is full of traps. ~ Charlie Jane Anders

We need to awaken the next generation to understand that we are all change-makers. The nation is not as strong as its government but its next generation ~ Nick Vujicic

[O]ur primary job as Christians is to love people, and we can't love from behind a barricade. But we have other God-given responsibilities too - to fight against those who make unjust decrees, rob the needy, and deprive the poor of their rights. We can make political the things that are political and make spiritual the things that are spiritual. ~ Alisa Harris

I just take one day at a time, pray, and know that whatever happens is God's will, so there's nothing I can do to change that. ~ Javon Ringer

Look at me, woman," Lor growled.
I turned my head and met his gaze coolly.
"If he tells you anything about us, we'll kill you. Do you understand that? One word, you die. So if you're walking around feeling cocky and protected because Barrons likes to fuck you, think again. The more he likes to do you, the more likely it is that one of us will kill you."
I looked up at Ryodan.
The owner of Chester's nodded.
"Nobody killed Fiona."
"She was a doormat."
I pushed the arm away from my neck. "Get out of my way."
"I would suggest you cure him of his little problem if you want to survive," Lor said.
"Oh, I'll survive."
"The farther away from him you get, the safer you are."
"Do you want me to find the Book or not?"
Ryodan answered. "We don't give a fuck if the Book is out there. Or that the walls are down. Times change, we go on."
"Then why are you helping with the ritual? V'lane said Barrons asked you and Lor to handle the other stones."
"For Barrons. But if he breathes one word about himself, you're dead."
"I thought he was the boss of you guys."
"He is. He made the rules we live by. We'll still take you from him."
Take you from him. Sometimes I was so dense. "And he knows that."
"We've had to do it before," Lor said. "Kasteo hasn't said a word to us since. I say get over it already. It's been a thousand fucking years. What's a woman worth?"
I inhaled slow and deep as the full ramification ~ Karen Marie Moning

Everything changes when you make a decision to be one of the courageous ones, someone who chooses to make a life, rather than a living. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh. ~ Anton Chekhov

When I was sworn in the Marine Corps in 1964, when I was sworn into Congress, I swore to uphold the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. We have a lot of domestic enemies of - of the Constitution, those who want to pervert it, those who want to change it. ~ Paul Broun

I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me. It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish brown here and there. When I started to walk away, it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered what the laws were on this kind of thing. There's a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People smiled at me and admired the goat. "It's not my goat," I explained. "It's the town's goat. I'm just taking my turn caring for it." "I didn't know we had a goat," one of them said. "I wonder when my turn is." "Soon," I said. "Be patient. Your time is coming." The goat stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew everything essential about me. We walked on. A police- man on his beat looked us over. "That's a mighty fine goat you got there," he said, stopping to admire. "It's the town's goat," I said. "His family goes back three-hundred years with us," I said, "from the beginning." The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped and looked up at me. "Mind if I pat him?" he asked. "Touching this goat will change your life," I said. "It's your decision." He thought real hard for a minute, and then stood up and said, "What's his name?" "He's called the Prince of Peace," I said. "God! This town is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers forever. Please forgive me if I cry." "We forgive you, Officer," I ~ James Tate

Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners ... Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Generals trump Majors," Ursan said.
"True, but do princes trump generals?"
"I attacked him."
"Ryne's not the type to hold a grudge."
Ursan considered. "Isn't he a king? Both his parents died"
"Technically, yes. But he hasn't assumed the title."
"Neither has Prince Kerrick," Ursan said. " Don't you find that odd?"
"Not with Kerrick. He loved his father very much. I think it's still too painful for him to assume the title. Plus he hasn't been home in years."
Ursan remained quiet until we reached his tent. "Prince Kerrick's a forest mage. Which means his eyes change colour with the seasons. Right?"
"Yes."
He stared at me for a moment. "Lucky guy." Ursan ducked into his tent. ~ Maria V. Snyder

Friends that become envious or jealous of you aren't bad people. The change came when you began going places in life they did not see for you. Some of them are afraid you will fail and fall. Some are afraid you will succeed and leave them. It's their belief system that attacks you, not their heart. ~ Troy Gathers

Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves ?Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here ?Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change ? ~ Donald Sutherland

You don't force change; you just open yourself to its possibilities and let it work through you. ~ Frederick Lenz

Alliances are crucial to success in the political sphere. However, if we are to approach other organizations to propose alliances for the public good, we must be prepared to assert a far more important role for the library. We must clearly define what we do and establish and assert the relationship of libraries to basic democratic freedoms, to the fundamental humanistic principles that are central to our very way of life ... ~ Arthur Curley