Timothy West Quotes

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

Nature does not make leaps.

We're in the midst of an evolution, not a revolution.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

I see only adaptations - not revolutions.

Real change happens a step at a time.

Change is incremental and real change, enduring change, occurs one step at a time.

Great institutions can only be reformed by stealth or by revolution.

Generally, people don't change their minds about fundamentally deeply held beliefs; it doesn't happen in an instant - it's a process.

Systemic change rarely comes overnight.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

There's no straight line to progress.

I realized that even big waves start with small ripples

If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.

There are moments in your life when the big pieces slide and shift. Sometimes the big changes dong happen gradually but all at once. That's how it was for us. That was the day we discovered that friends can do things for you that your parents can't.

The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

Old habits cannot be thrown out the upstairs window. They have to be coaxed downstairs one step at a time.

Our culture teaches us that making significant changes takes a long time and is difficult to do. This is simply NOT true. Change happens in an instant. It is not a process - it is something you do in an instant by simply making a decision.

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.