John Major Quotes

You have to be damn certain you're putting something better in its place.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear… We never know enough to make the chance worth taking.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

To me, success in the job is setting a vision, guiding an organization through change - which is exactly what I did at Digitas, and I'm very proud of that - and bringing people together and with you. That, to me, is what it takes to be successful.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

Take actions that will give people hope.

… a closed world. … an almost perfect record of resisting change. … fragmented, loosely managed, and poorly coordinated. … often unable to gather intelligence about the things we care the most about. … analysts do not always tell the decision makers just how limited their information really is. … increasingly irrelevant to the new challenges presented by weapons of mass destruction. … espionage is always chancy at best. Still we have no choice but to do better.

Leaders make things better and that requires change.

Everyone knows that not all change is good or even necessary. But in a world that is constantly changing, it is to our advantage to learn how to adapt and enjoy something better.

It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.

I have been long sensible that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and placing our rising generation on the level of our sister states (which they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient insensible of needing it.

Politicians are making deals for their benefit. Now we are going to make the deals for the American people.

Those that recognize the inevitability of change stand to benefit the most from it.

Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

Leaders fix things that are broken.

There is an enormous inertia that prevents people from change. You must always remember that it is impossible to make something better if you don't make it different - the converse is not true, of course. You cannot make something better unless it is different. And different scares the life out of so many people.

Without change, there is no innovation, creativity or incentive for improvement

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.

We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one; it is established, and it is understood.

You can change things, you can make things better.

What's wrong with the world and what can we do to change it?

I think that the people who are the loudest about wanting to change you are the people with the least amount of vision and creativity.