Bayard Rustin Quotes

There's a battle outside raging It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a-changing.

In Europe the various ranks of society are, like the strata of the earth, fixed and fossilized. There can be no great change without a terrible upheaval, a social earthquake.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

I fear that some day or another we shall have in Europe a total upsetting of social order, which will drive all wise and experienced men to America.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

The fact that the young, perceiving themselves at a turning point in history, do not feel at home in the society and wish to change it, is a sign of portentous changes and of the difficult travails within which a new humanity is born.

Modernity is disruptive, and I endorse that.

When the fabric of society is so rigid that it cannot change quickly enough, adjustments are achieved by social unrest and revolutions.

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

All revolutions invariably encourage bad characters and potential criminals.

Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.

Something is stirring in the hearts and minds of the people.

Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether the government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant. American society is about the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American Society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do.

They are as blind to some of the tendencies of the time as the French Noblese was before the French Revolution.

This is the age of disruption.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.

America is ripe for a service revolution.

Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.

Don't accept the old order. Get rid of it.

I love challenging the status quo.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.