Stephanie Coontz Quotes

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Any time you have change, it costs somebody. Somebody is a loser.

You know what I learned? Everything has a price.

There is no change without sacrifice.

Sometimes altering your position is the right thing. Sometimes it's not.

Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There's a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just for leaving things as they are, a price for everything.

You pay a price for everything in life.

Saying 'yes' to one thing means saying 'no' to another. That's why decisions can be hard sometimes.

What's called a difficult decision is a difficult decision because either way you go there are penalties.

Starting off, all options are always open, but as soon as you choose something, you inevitably limit yourself. If you go for B, A is out.

Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

There's always a price for what you want.

Comfort and growth cannot coexist.

This is part of the price we pay, I guess, for living in paradise.

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.

Mistakes happen in wars. Wars do not go well…. But we adjust.

You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.

Life is full of trade-offs. At different phrases in your life, you're able to do certain things that you can't do at other phases. And you make choices.

You can't have your kayak and heat it.

You can achieve one thing, but because of that, you have to adapt or lose something else. If you end up in a relationship, you sometimes have to lose the closeness of your friendships, for example, or you have to move away somewhere... For me, that creates the sense of melancholy which I think exists in most people's lives.

With any huge change, you need to expect and accept that people will have their own opinions and feel the need to express them.

Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.