Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture . . .

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

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.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

We are in the midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled.

The Arab world’s wave of change was a century in the making, Why expect its effects to become clear in the space of months

This is only a preliminary step toward a similar revolution everywhere.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

Revolution cleanses men, improving them as the experimental farmer corrects the defects of his plants.

The world was very feminine when I was young. And now it's very masculine.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

This will arguably be the third great revolution of America, if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that's not on the ballot.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

There can be conscious revolution.

The world that has made us can no longer contain us

Indeed, I suspect that the changes that have taken place during the last century in the average man's fundamental beliefs, in his philosophy, in his conception of religion, in his whole world outlook, are greater than the changes that occurred during the preceding four thousand years all put together.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another. We have to see today in light of the transition, say, from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry, and from industry to post-industry. We're in an epoch transition.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.