Francois Mitterrand Quotes

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

Every single change is fought by those who would be affected by it.

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

Sometimes, when a tide starts to sweep, it makes no difference what the traditions are.

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it turns out to be not what they meant, other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

History shows us that the youth are usually a step ahead of their elders when change is required.

One of the reasons that change takes place is that the people who produce it believe change can take place.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight...

In a progressive country change is constant;… change … is inevitable

In order to make the changes work, the majority of members of society that has entered into the changes must wake up every morning with a feeling of the great historical moment, with the feeling of something big and extraordinary.

Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.

A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.

There is resistance to change. There's a resistance to ideas.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Political and social change is always a stagger-step process. One step forward, two steps back. They want you to give up.

When you're a catalyst for change, you make enemies - and I'm proud of the ones I've got.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.