Edmund Wilson Quotes

Altered social conditions may remove certain ailments and deformities in existing society. But the new and more beautiful society will not be formed exclusively - or even mainly - by improved conditions, but above all by more perfect human beings.

That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens.

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

The conception that, instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who, though they are still comparatively few, are getting more and more of a hearing.

To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.

A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

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

I want to be known as a catalyst for change.

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Human society cannot, be changed in a year.

Of all the things we have done, the most important - the one that history will record as the principal contribution of our generation - is that we understand how to turn the armed struggle into a Revolution; that we realized that it was essential to create a new mentality to build a new society.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.

I have truly been inspired by the struggle and triumphs of so many women that dare to break new ground in all aspects of society, and those who have pushed the boundaries of human imagination.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

If you ask why I do what I do - I want to make a difference. I don't just want to maintain the status quo. I want to help people, to work with institutions or create ones when they don't exist.

People all over the world are today questioning matters that only a few generations ago were generally seen as "just the way things are.”

If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing.

Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.

Law cannot stand apart from the social changes around it.

Courts should ... follow, rather than lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society, and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.