Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me.

Ideas have consequences that can transform society.

The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.

It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world.

The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

We accept the world in order to change it. If you do not accept, then what are you going to change?

To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.

I'm part of an important movement that needs to happen.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

As we approach each of the great social challenges of our time we must acknowledge that old thinking will not provide the new solutions we need. These solutions will be uncomfortable, hard to sell and risky to execute. But the cost of not doing so is even greater.

I'm trying to change the world.

Reform is China's second revolution.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

I'm an agent of change all day long, and I want to meet other people like that.

Changing the world is not easy.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

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

I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.

To build socialism means not only building gigantic factories and flour mills. This is essential but not enough for building socialism. People must grow in mind and heart.

Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or create new worlds out of nothing.

The world which we now live in must be transformed, yet there is a dearth of ideas about how it is to be done.

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.

My presence is to instigate and incite the people for any change they want, and for not having a change that they don't wish to do.