George Bernard Shaw Quotes

As the middle begins to feel safe enough to accept some of the so-called radical thinking, ideas move to the middle and a new edge is created.

Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities.

I've always been attracted to comedy that was really close to the line and made people a little uncomfortable, because that's where progress comes from.

The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.

The young people are the most active and vital force in society. They are the most eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking. This is especially so in the era of socialism.

Society never progresses because the majority one day wakes up and says, “Let’s do things differently.” The majority didn’t wake up and say, “Oh, let’s just free the slaves.” ... Society always progressed because a relatively small group of people — usually considered outrageous radicals by the status quo of their time — had a better idea and articulated another way. That’s simply how evolution works; it’s the mutation — the member of the species who does things differently - that points the way to the future because they’re better adapted for survival.

Because the artist deals in future realities, he always seeks improvements or changes in the existing reality. This makes the artist, inevitably and invariably, a rebel against the status quo. The artist, day by day, by postulating the new realities of the future, accomplishes peaceful revolution.

I feel like I have been able to notice throughout the incremental march of history during the course of my own lifetime patterns emerging, and there's a sort of a rubber band effect that happens where social growth and change is concerned.

Every new truth begins in a shocking heresy.

The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

As a designer, I'm supposed to be provoking people's reactions, and getting people to see things differently. I think more of us should be doing this. Because yeah, maybe guys are not gonna want to wear my stuff, but they'll think that they can maybe wear something a little bit more than what they've been wearing. That's the only way things move forward.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

I've always done music to push people to get them to get uncomfortable in their seat so they could wrestle with things. Not to become pew potatoes, just simply sitting there, growing fat with knowledge and not applying it.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

There is still such a thing as subversive. Subversive makes hip people nervous. It's something new that scares you in a good way. I mean, subversive to me is a compliment. Subversive is something that influences people to do something against society that they haven't thought of before.

If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

People are becoming more intimately acquainted with people who are different than them - it's not so unusual anymore.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

In the case of Michael Moore, having a deep, I'd even say passionate, understanding of other types of people in America who might be progressive thinkers without even realizing it.

When men and women think, the first step to progress is taken.

Change is constant in a progressive country.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.