Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

You have to move forward. It's constantly changing. Everything changes and everything falls apart. You have to be nimble and on your toes and accessible to it all. Not everyone is on board with this.

Nothing is written stone, child. Even if it were, the stones can be shattered

I've never really been settled. I don't think I've ever known what it was like to be a person that was used to sitting still. I think it's given me the ability to detach from any situation.

What I love about my work is the variety and not knowing what's coming next, and being able to embrace something for a period of time and know something new is going to follow.

I spoke Spanish when I was three, and then Maltese. I love dictionaries. I like foreigners. My dad moved every year before I was 14, and I learnt to like abroad. I'm not scared of change.

We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

We tell prospective hires, 'If you want an environment that is never going to change, don't come here. This is not the place for you.'

We moved a lot. I went to nine schools in four states before I was 14. It gave me tough skin, exposed me to lots of different kinds of people and made me somewhat adaptable.

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.

If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.

The world's a scene of changes.

Stability was overrated. Crises and adventures, on the other hand, could actually teach you something.

People would pull the rug out from under me. So I learnt how to dance on a moving carpet.

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.

All is flux; nothing stays still.

They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.

I have been moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine.

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

I'm not the type of person that just needs to feel concrete and like nothing's going to change. I revel in the change.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.

I think you have to sort of accept that nobody really knows where it's going so there has to be a lot of impulsive kind of attitudes. So it's like a train that's moving and you don't quite know where it's going but you try to steer it in the best way you can realizing that it may go in different places that you had no idea.

In times of turbulence and rapid change, you must constantly be re-evaluating yourself relative to the new realities.

I don't like anything permanent; I have to be able to flee. You have to be able to flee at a moment's notice.