It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
A leopard doesn't change his spots just because you bring him in from the jungle and try to housebreak him and turn him into a pet. He may learn to sheathe his claws in order to beg a few scraps off the dinner table, and you may teach him to be a beast of burden, but it doesn't pay to forget that he'll al ways be what he was born: a wild animal.
You've tried to reform what will not learn. Shut doors on traits that you wish were dead; They will open a window and return.
The only thing you can never change is your values.
You cannot change the stripes of a leopard.
You really can't take a cat and turn it into a dog, or try and get lemons off an apple tree, or what have you.
Reformers on the left and right alike must give up the fantasy that humans are blank slates who can be overwritten with ideal values, however discomfiting or disappointing the realization may be.
The things I can't change are the reasons you'll love me
I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.
The bottom line in both cases is that people don't change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into something she's not.
People don't change at their core. If you're a good person, you are a good person. What changes is our behavior.
When qualities have become fixed in men by nature or by the training of a long period of time, it is impossible for them to lay them aside thus lightly.
