Change For Society Quotes

“As we try to change society to fit our standards and bring about the sense of peace we long for, it is only when we turn inwards, clean our own backyards and serve as a source of inspiration that society will improve on its own.”

— Dana Gore

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”

— Ernst Fischer

“You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won't change.”

— Greg Mortenson

“The most distinguished hallmark of the American society is and always has been change.”

— Eric Sevareid

“You must try to change some things in your society and all good changes first start attacking old rotten ideas, storming common cultural stupidities and raiding spiritual lies, fearlessly and even ruthlessly! And never forget that you can defat ideas only with ideas!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“By including children with different learning abilities in mainstream and specialized schools, we can change attitudes and promote respect. By creating suitable jobs for adults with autism, we integrate them into society.”

— Ban Ki-moon

“That's what it's about, how society changes people but people can also change society. It only takes a few people to do things and help themselves instead of sitting around on their asses. She has a very global outlook on life and all sorts of things.”

— Mary Hansen

“If we don't change from a world society that worships money and power to one that worships compassion and generosity, I think we'll be extinct by mid-century. I don't say that as an alarmist or as a pessimist.”

— Patch Adams

“I believe in the power of intention to change the landscape of our society - and it is my intention to live an authentic life of compassion and integrity and action. Jamey Rodemeyer's life changed mine.”

— Zachary Quinto

“In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.”

— Zygmunt Bauman

“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“Americans are coming to their senses, and the libertarian theory of society and government is pointing the way. The times change, but the enduring principles that help us to interpret and understand the world do not. It remains true now, as then, as in the future, saecula saeculorum, that government provides neither an effective nor a moral means for solving any human problem.”

— Llewellyn Rockwell

“Anything that you can shock somebody with. The only way to change something is to shock it. If you want your muscles to grow, you have to shock them. If you want society to change, you have to shock them.”

— Jaden Smith

“In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed ... It means facing a system that does not lend its self to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”

— Ella Baker

“I'm not in this just to change the law. It's about changing society. I want gay kids to grow up believing that they can get married, that they can join the Scouts, that they can choose the life they want to live.”

— Evan Wolfson

“There's one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between "ideals," and with luck they won't have left their genes behind because they'll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they're too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.”

— John Brunner

“I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.”

— Arnold Adoff

“Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.”

— Shelby Steele

“Civil disobedience can help to focus attention on a particular injustice. It was used historically to highlight wrongs in society - turning ancient redwood forests into paper towels or preventing people from sitting down at lunch counters because of the color of their skin. On climate change, we have not seen strong leadership coming from Washington, DC.In particular the president has an enormous opportunity to follow up on his inaugural speech with a concerted course of action to aggressively take on a clean energy transition.”

— Michael Brune

“You can put your TV in the garage, avoid movies altogether, and use earplugs to spare your hearing from the sounds of hip-hop or heavy metal, but these forms of entertainment will still change your life through their influence on everyone else in society. Though you may struggle to protect your own kids from music that encourages violence or drugs or irresponsible sex, you can't possibly protect them from all the other kids in your community who have received full exposure.”

— Michael Medved

“In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”

— Gro Harlem Brundtland

“Why have we had such a decline in moral climate? I submit to you that a major factor has been a change in the philosophy which has been dominant, a change from belief in individual responsibility to belief in social responsibility. If you adopt the view that a man is not responsible for his own behavior, that somehow society is responsible, why should he seek to make his behavior good?”

— Milton Friedman

“Women and men have to fight together to change society - and both will benefit.”

— Muriel Fox

“Black is beautiful when it is a slum kid studying to enter college, when it is a man learning new skills for a new job, or a slum mother battling to give her kids a chance for a better life. But white is beautiful, too, when it helps change society to make our system work for black people also. White is ugly when it oppresses blacks-and so is black ugly when black people exploit other blacks. No race has a monopoly on vice or virtue, and the worth of an individual is not related to the color of his skin.”

— Whitney M. Young

“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”

— Peter Drucker

“We have to accept as a society that games are not escapist. They really do change us.”

— Jane McGonigal

“Women are suffering because they are being excluded. The high military council excluded women from the committee to change the constitution [of Egypt]. We cannot be liberated as women in a society built on class oppression or gender oppression or religious oppression.”

— Nawal El-Saadawi

“Society is an organism which obeys the immutable law of progress; and change, judicious and cautious change, is necessary for the well being, and indeed the preservation of the social system.”

— Swami Vivekananda

“Every change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend through the whole of society. Every change thus in a sense creates a "problemfor society, even though no single individual perceives it as such; it is gradually "solvedby the establishment of a new overall adjustment.”

— Friedrich August Von Hayek

“I think my government are fascists. I feel that if we don't change from a society that worships money and power over to one that worships compassion and generosity, there is no hope for human survival this century.”

— Patch Adams

“John Wesley taught that the gospel of Christ involved more than saving souls. It should have an impact on all of society, and his followers worked to accomplish just that. They were dispensing grace to the broader world, and in the process their spirit helped change a nation, saving it from the revolutionary chaos that had spread across Europe.”

— Philip Yancey

“Successfully reframing the climate debate in the United States from one based on environmental values to one based on health values ... holds great promise to help American society better understand and appreciate the risks of climate change ...”

— George Mason

“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

“We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

“Many an individual has turned from the mean, personal, acquisitive point of view to one that sees society as a whole and works for its benefit. If there has been such a change in one person, there can be the same change in many.”

— Mahatma Gandhi