Political Change Quotes

“Sentimentality was used because other political avenues were closed, and authors hoped that through it they could bring about a political change that would fulfill the egalitarian promises of the Revolution. Real political venues were unavailable, so fiction became a medium for authors to appeal to audiences for change.”
― Todd M. Brenneman, Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism

“Real change from the status quo will never come from electing a politician—especially not one who leads a political party dedicated to upholding that status quo.”
― Alan Maass, The Case for Socialism

“In my genitor’s home, too, there were meetings of people who, like him, hoped that the tribunes would hold out and who more or less had reasons for their hopes. They tried to raise each other’s spirits; they heard more or less sensible things. I could judge them from my perspective as an anarch, who, although personally indifferent to the whole business, found it fascinating as a historic issue. Moreover, I may have been the only person who was not afraid. I relished what I was listening to, like Stendhal on such an occasion. I appreciate him also as a historian.

Now I am not putting down fear. It is a foundation of physicality, indeed of physics. If the ground wobbles or if the house so much as threatens to collapse, one looks for the door. This, too, creates a selection – say, of those people who did not fall into the trap.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“No revolution, no political change, is ever born from immaculate conception.”
― Mike Klepper

“Eagles do fly alone but feed their families.”
― Kangoma Kindembo

“The first time he saw her she was wearing a blue khaki uniform and a pair of shabby pigskin shoes - like those worn by high school students - under a pair of baggy pants. He would have sworn that she had come from the police department to check their residence permits. He was even more surprised when she opened her mouth - half the words that tumbled out were political phrases lifted straight from the newspaper. He had heard Wang Qiyao mention Jiang Lili and knew about her family background, but the woman before him did not conform to the description at all: he couldn't figure out which side of her was real and which was merely a show.”
― Wang Anyi

“It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse...”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“We have seen viruses which reproduced themselves in packs to do evil, but we have also seen the atom, which when split in half, destroy itself and the viruses, thus, generating a power never seen on the face of the Earth.
A little bit later in eternity, we have met with the nucleus whose individual fission produces in profusion more than what the atom ever imagined. - On the Power of the Little Guy”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Awakening

“We have seen viruses which reproduced themselves in packs to do evil, but we have also seen the atom, which when split in half, destroys itself and the viruses, thus, generating a power never seen on the face of the Earth.
A little bit later in eternity, we have met with the nucleus whose individual fission produces in profusion more than what the atom ever imagined. - On the Power of the Little Guy”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Awakening

“It is also apparent, especially to those familiar with the old order, that all these improvements have evolved from a foundation of social relations and class power built around the architecture of white supremacy. Vestiges of that foundation remain visible within current arrangements, and it can seem commonsensical, therefore, to suspect that it continues to shape the limits of the new structures of routine life. That is one reason, for example, that discussions of the relation between race and life chances in the contemporary United States gravitate so easily toward allusion to the explicit racial hierarchies that defined the Jim Crow era as an alternative to deep examination of the discrete processes that ground and reproduce inequality in the present. But commonsense rests on projection of the familiar and thereby stresses continuity over change. Unquestioned power and deference persist in the region, but their connection to race is no longer straightforward or easily predictable. The tendency to mistake superficially familiar imagery for actual continuity threatens to obscure how the present differs most meaningfully from the past.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Longevity can be a source of corrective optimism. I recall an occasion early in the George W. Bush presidency when my friend and former physician, Quentin Young, was confronted at a talk by a medical student who lamented that she couldn't imagine being able to win any progressive objectives because the right had been in power all her conscious life. Quentin, who was then about eighty years old, responded that a virtue of having lived as long as he had was that he knew that almost no one, no matter how far left or how optimistic, standing in 1950 would have predicted that the back of the Jim Crow system would be broken within fifteen years. He was correct, and that's a good lesson for us all to keep in mind in this most perilous time in this country and the world.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr.