Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Quotes

This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.

Without hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

You could have the world in the palm of your hand, but it don't mean a thing 'til you change it.

The only way you really see change is by helping to create it.

But it's not about knowing. It is simply about going forward.

Progress just means bad things happen faster.

I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.

Resisting the powers that be, we are keeping things from getting worse than they otherwise might be. And that effort is very much worthwhile.

If you never get criticized, chances are you aren't getting anything done.

I am a progressive who gets things done. And the root of that word, progressive, is progress.

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

Don't wait until you are perfect to change the world.

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

Revolution begins with one step

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

You have to make change.

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

The spider dances her web without knowing there are flies that will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam gets caught without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them "It" dances. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed-more I cannot say.

The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing.

The world needs change, change needs an activity. It has to be planted by a thought.

Nothing has changed, or will change. So we must change it.

Few are they who have never had a chance to achieve happiness- and fewer those who have taken that chance.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.

The chance is the remotest, Of its going much longer unnoticed, That I'm not keeping pace With the headlong human race