Saturday Quote-a-thon: Change

Hey, I got a request and a good one. So, for Relax Max, here are some quotes on change. I’m working from an older version of my quote file, so forgive me if I accidentally have a repeat here.

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
--Sydney J. Harris

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
--Aldous Huxley

I wake up each morning determined to change the World and also to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes that makes planning the day a little difficult.
--E.B. White

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
-- James Baldwin

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
-- William O. Douglas

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
--Sir Francis Bacon

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.
--Niccolò Machiavelli

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)
--Carl Sagan

Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority.
-- William Jennings Bryan

Never mistake motion for action.
-- Ernest Hemingway

NO BRAINER, n. A decision which, viewed through the retrospectoscope, is "obvious" to those who failed to make it originally.

The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it — once you can honestly say, "I don't know", then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
-Robert Heinlein

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
-Robert Heinlein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
-Albert Einstein

Mr. Newberry: So, what have you been doing with your life?
Martin: Um... professional killer.
Mr. Newberry: Ah, good for you! It's a growth industry
-From Gross Pointe Blank

Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker — he, however, is the creator. Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses — and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh — those who grave new values on new tables.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
-Arthur Koestler

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
-E. L. Doctorow

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Here's a Challenge

Sorry, I wrote this yesterday. I just now realized I didn't publish the damn thing.

On my last post, someone seemed to think we (the US) might be too puritanical for the change of just accepting gays in the military (which isn't to presume how this person feels on the topic itself).

Well, that got me to thinking. When have we ever made a change where we moved in the direction of tolerance, eradicating discrimination, or expanding support or protection to a previously unprotected segment of the population where the reaction was so bad we eventually undid it?

Now, let me put some parameters in this. I'm not talking about people swallowing the benefits for undoing progress because they're not old enough to remember what it was like before, like the self-deluded railing against vaccines (perhaps because they don't remember the horrors of the diseases that have all but disappeared due to vaccines - that "all but" being critical) or those who remember the good old days when "no one needed an abortion" because they won't remember or don't know about the women maimed for life or killed with back alley illegal abortions - back when being pregnant and unmarried meant ruin. But that's not what I'm talking about here: those are proposed changes to the status quo because there's at least a whole generation that's lived with this.

No, what I'm looking for is when have the ones against these changes been demonstrably right, so right we had to step back and do something different. I mean, I'm thinking of suffrage for blacks, women, Native Americans. Laws to protect workers, medicare, medicaid, social security, child labor laws, and, yes, laws to protect gays or even allow them to marry.

Let's face it, all of these changes had doomsayers who predicted the end of life as we know it as a result. Did it happen? I don't mean some disgruntlement, usually among the same doomsayers, but real issues either similar to those predicted or ones we didn't see coming that demonstrated the change was untenable?

That's what I think. I think the problems will be limited almost entirely to the ones predicting horrors now and the fact they didn't get their way. And, with an adjustment period shorter than anyone predicts, it won't be any big deal.

Because, here's the thing, there are gays in the military now. They're serving our nation and fighting or working alongside the rest of us with *gasp* no horrible things happening to their comrades as a result. No one is bothered because their preference doesn't make any difference in the kind of soldiers they are or how they treat others. We repay their sacrifice by making them lie to the rest of us to do what they do, lie to their comrades, keep secrets in order to stay there.

I don't see how that makes any sense. Just sayin'.

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