Best 195 quotes in «social change quotes» category

Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. Humanity will never move forward, spiritually or morally, to become superior beings.

Our need for social and personal change and power is often co-opted and trivialized into an adolescent and self-centered kind of rebellion.

Our situation is intolerable, but what's worse is to sit here and do nothing.

Personal redemption cannot take place apart from the redemption of our social structures.

Personal growth will cause a ripple effect as the growth in consciousness of enough people, one by one, can create general change, and lasting social improvements.

Philanthropists should find innovations that release the energies of people. Individuals don't want to be taken care of --they need to be given a chance to fulfill their own potential. (142)

Pick a piece of the problem that you can help solve while trying to see how your piece fits into the broader social change puzzle.

Points of views that are expressed on Twitter don’t intend to offend, but rather defend and open the conversation up to everyone so that no one has to pretend.

Privileged people can feel the way these identities threaten their privileged status and the benefits that they receive as a result. For this reason also, trying to reassure hegemony that these identities are not a threat to it (for the purpose of being "accepted" into society) is moot. Hegemony is right to feel threatened, because there's no way one could change social order without deconstructing power.

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.

Real social change is a process that takes place over time, usually quite a long time. At a given moment in history, 99 percent of a society may think and act one way on a certain matter, and only 1 percent think and act very differently. In time, that 1 percent may become 2 percent, then 5 percent, then 10, 20, 30 percent, until finally it becomes the dominant majority, and social change has taken place.

Revolutions are infinite.

Revolution does not begin with a group. It begins from the heart.

Rise to become human again, my friend. Become the human, that talks human, acts human and lives human.

Sacrifice everything that is yours, to call up the humans in others.

Shimmel: “NEVER TRUST THE GOYIM. They are just like these other weird dangerous people, Messianic Jews! How dare Jews become “Christian-like”, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!

Sarucha (age 8): "Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!" she exclaimed.

People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to

Since the beginning of the human tribe around 10,000 years ago, tell me, has there been a single day in our collective human history where a man did not kill another man? The anticipated answer saddens and empties my heart of any promise.

Socially, politically, economically, militarily, culturally, racially, sexually, demographically, even mythologically, World War II was the crucible that forged modern America. It was the transforming event that reshaped all who lived through it, and continues to affect those born after it. Only the American Revolution that created the new nation and the Civil War that preserved the Union rank with it in importance.

So endgames are naturally messy. They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that's what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control.

Society is a vicious rubber stamp Labelling and assigning camps But love is an illuminating lamp.

So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel-drum band is ready to play aren’t you” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.

Sometimes in life we can't choose the path we walk, the path we travel on, but we can choose how we decide to walk our path in life.

Speak truth and you will be attacked by the untruthful. Speak about absolutely nothing, and nothing will speak back, but then nothing will ever change.

Start being the change yourself, and the world will change - see the rules that harm the society and overwhelm them with reasoning, compassion and conscience, and they will cease to exist, perhaps slowly, but inevitably.

Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.

The activist path is not easy, but it is the only reasonable path for those who desire change.

The day I realized I could speak well, I decided I won't speak for myself anymore.

The first - the most obvious (test of a true social entrepreneur) - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea... The idea - making it happen across society - is something they are married to in the full sense of the word. One key test of that is this: Is this an idea that you see growing out of their whole life? I get very, very suspicious when I see someone who had an idea two years ago. It just doesn't ring true. Because with the typical entrepreneur you can see the roots of the interest when they're very young. There's a real coherence to people's lives.

[T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things.

Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change--a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.

The Metropolitan Health Act was the first of its kind in the United States. Many consider it a turning point in the history of American city life.

The more we humanize the society, the more we will become humans.

The most enduring and galvanizing ideas and values of our civilization are embedded in our stories, from those of Homer, […] and Virgil, […] and to Jesus. It seems to be in our genetic makeup to capture our best ideas in stories, to enjoy them, to learn form them, and to pass them on to others (25)

The only cure for all social ills in our world today is the discovery and creation of more and more ordinary everyday heroes.

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.

The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the human race and what it means to be a human being.

The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.

The poor stay poor here because they do not save enough.

​The purpose of religion was to help humans lead a peaceful life, not to take away life. God/Allah/Ishvar or Hindu/Muslim/Christian are just words - words created by different human minds. Instead of blindly following the outdated ideologies, use your own mind to realize the truth that you are not just a label. You are a living entity - the very manifestation of the energy you call God. Energy has no form or gender, but different languages have created different images, thus leading to discrimination and conflict to an extent that people can kill on name of religion. If a religion causes one to take innocent life, then we don't need a religion. we just need human beings on earth.

The real determinant of society is hidden behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money, profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very existence of the state. If we want to change society, we must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour, do something else.

There is no change within a society that does not begin within an individual.

There's a reason why I've spent one-third of my life doing this. My dream is to meet and connect 3 billion young people of the world to information and opportunities in my lifetime.

The scales of justice are tilted by money It's rather ironic but far from funny The powerful get cuff links, not handcuffs While prison bars make others' hands rough.

The society is neurotic – it is a fact – no conscientious creature can deny it. But my question to you is – what are you doing to obliterate this neuroticism for good?

The space between the private and the public is the nexus of the personal and the social, if not political. It’s where we meet the strong or subtle cultural censors who attempt to define what community, race, class, or gender can or cannot speak, to tell us which stories are told and valued and which are not. In short, it’s where we’re reminded of the power of personal stories and the power of the storyteller.

We are revolutionaries for peace and freedom not violence. And we are going to fight through creativity rather than aggression.

We keep waiting for another Mahatma to make a difference in our society and nation. Well it is time to stop waiting. The mantra is “I change to change India”. Which means each of us is the Mahatma and has the power to change this nation. Failing which we shall never change for the better.

We live in graves and call them home, and we further sustain the neurotic structure of those graves with elements of so-called sociological, cultural, traditional, religious, political and intellectual significance.