Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It takes time to change a system and to change a mindset.

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

The world needs change, change needs an activity. It has to be planted by a thought.

More essential than working on attitudes and behaviors is examining the paradigms out of which those attitudes and behaviors flow.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

Changing people’s expectation is the hardest thing to do.

In politics, as in every other department of life, the clashing of thought is sometimes a proof of disease, but always a promise of reform.

You get few chances to make really transformational institutional change.

We want traditional change—not transformational change.

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of its exhausted ideas.

The old ideas won’t do.

If you want to really change something, do not try to fight the existing reality. create a new reality.

Broken institutions are an opportunity rather than a time to go home.

Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can't just keep doing what we've been doing.

This is what a crisis does: It makes you question the status quo. That doesn't mean that after a crisis we move into some kind of utopia. But it is an opportunity for political change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind.

Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.

I think by shattering it we can create a new form, a new way to look at what is valuable — how we decide what is valuable.

To learn is to change how you think.

The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. Thought finds its way into action.

More and more people are beginning to feel that there must be another way of thinking, perceiving, and acting. And perhaps the beginning of another way of looking at the world is to re-evaluate all of our beliefs. It is, after all, our beliefs that determine what we are, experience, and expect. When we are willing to take a new look at our own beliefs, we then have an opportunity to begin rediscovering who and what we are and to redetermine our true purpose on Earth.