Maximilien De Bethune, Duke of Sully Quotes

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

The Chinese move very slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.

The power of a movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion.

Man is as the Lord made him. But we can change our institutions.

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

… 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.

Creating deep and meaningful change in this country takes time - years and sometimes decades.

Revolutions demand enormous sacrifices and, at the same time, create a new need to change the world again.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

The modernity of yesterday is the tradition of today, and the modernity of today will be tradition tomorrow.

A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight.

Reform is not like pushing a button…. If you don’t have peace, you have to spend most of your money on the army and security issues. All of these factors won’t make reform fast. It will definitely be slow. We are living under tension … you can’t have reform under tension.

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

There's a battle outside raging It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a-changing.

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

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

I want to be known as a catalyst for change.

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

Sometimes, when a tide starts to sweep, it makes no difference what the traditions are.

Cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs.

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

[T]he great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.