Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

In every age of transition men are never so firmly bound to one way of life as when they are about to abandon it.

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

The world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

When I was your age, we didn't have the Internet in our pants. We didn't even have the Internet not in our pants. That's how bad it was. I know I sound like my grandfather right now. We didn't have teeth! There were no questions marks, we just had words! What was I talking about? The Internet...Not only can you not plan the impact you're going to have, you often won't recognize it when you're having it.

There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes the fortunes of the world.

No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.

Severe opposition is a measure of success (because) one inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.

The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

The world that has made us can no longer contain us

The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when in talking about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind." We're at that sort of turning point in human history.

The American people are both anxious for change. We're in a time of flux.

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control.

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.