Harold Wilson Quotes

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution.

In our State the locomotive has waked up the sleeping energies of a great people, and is transforming wasted fields into blooming gardens, and arousing men and women from the dull and heavy sleep that dwells with satisfaction upon the past, into the bright intelligence that looks to a glorious future ….

Do you believe that life today is the same as it was 10 centuries ago? This tremendous change was produced by the West. Who else produced it?

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

When I was growing up, government was the agent of change: it was a developing country. What was important was to make a difference.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

Reform is China's second revolution.

Only through perils and upheavals can Nations be brought to further developments. May the present upheavals lead to a better world.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Give us 20 years, and you'll not recognize this country!

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

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

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

… modern civilization … enables us to cure sickness on a huge scale and to destroy each other on a huge scale. It enables us to liberate each other on a huge scale and to tyrannize each other on a huge scale…. There is no evidence of any continuous upward line of social progress

Economic prosperity is a great engine for change.

The lesson of the past 100 years is that as the United States grows wealthier, Americans become willing to spend more to insure risk and enhance fairness. Advances in social policy come only intermittently but they do come. And when they come, they usually last.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

The nation is trying to catch up with a rapidly changing world.

Around the year 2000, countries such as France, the Netherlands and the US were already five times as wealthy as in 1930. Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

Education, particularly higher education, will take Africa into the mainstream of globalization.

As long I still have a breath left in me I will dedicate myself fully to China's reform.