superficial change Quotes

The attempt to make a distinction between recovery and reform is a narrowly conceived effort to substitute the appearance of reality for reality itself. When a man is convalescing from illness, wisdom dictates not only cure of the symptoms but also removal of their cause.

Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant.

We won't be different for different's sake. Different is easy... make it pink and fluffy! Better is harder. Making something different often has a marketing and corporate agenda.

Many have passed idly through the Indian schools during the last decade, afterward to boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization

There are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.

A campaign conversion isn't the same as a lifetime of conviction.

You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.

Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in. It's change you can Xerox.

Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see... rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

You can put lipstick and earrings on a hog and call it Monique, but it's still a pig.

Take a random selection of photographs of America in 2012 and 2002 and 1992 and, except for the skinny jeans and the porkpie hats, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the years in which the pictures were taken.

Most reformers, like a pair of trousers on a windy clothesline, go through a vast deal of vehement motion, but stay in the same place.

Getting a life’ is something only a complete idiot could believe. Like you can just drive to a store and get a life. See it in its shiny box and look inside the plastic window and catch a glimpse of yourself in a new life and say, ‘Wow, I look much happier — I think this is the life I need to get!’, take it to the counter, ring it up, put it on your credit card. If getting a life was that easy, we’d be one blissed-out race.

You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle.

I felt that the world, and in particular this country, were going in circles. What had happened 40 or 50 years ago was happening again, but even in a worse form - that we were sinking into a lot of ignorance and a lot of superficial change.

A pig painted gold is still a pig.

It's always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she's the same old broad.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation.

That's how diversity becomes a gimmick or device, when it is introduced but not supported.

[Mrs. Teasdale]: He's had a change of heart. [Groucho]: A lot of good that'll do him. He's still got the same face.

I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.