Change and Transformation

L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était .

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I reckon I got to light out for the Territoryahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’sgoing to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’tstand it. I been there before.

Revolution . . . ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, fromhaving heard what had been done beforecarried to a still greater excess the refinementof their inventions, as manifested to thecunning of their enterprises and the atrocityof their reprisals. Words had to change theirordinary meaning and to take that which wasnow given them.

[ Of Napoleon’s costly victory at the Battle of Borodino, 1812 :] C’est le commencement de la fin . This is the beginning of the end.

[ The character Topsy speaking :] I s’pect I growed.

Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas comeup an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin’.

Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect.

Progress . . . is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature.

The One remains, the many change and pass;

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation . . . that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within , incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

[ Of a girl before marriage :] As an apple reddens on the high bough; high atop the highest bough the apple pickers passed it by—no, not passed it by, but they could not reach it.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell. . . . You enterprised a railroad . . . you blasted its rocks away. . . . And now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest . . . of his head.

Modern complexities call also for a constant infusion of new blood in the courts, just as it is needed in executive functions of the Government and in private business. A lowered mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions. Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses fitted, as it were, for the needs of another generation; older men, assuming that the scene is the same as it was in the past, cease to explore or to inquire into the present or the future.

[ On the “court-packing plan” increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices :] This plan will save our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle.

In the past few days . . . it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort [to remain in office as president despite the Watergate scandal]. . . . But with the disappearance of that base, I now believe that the constitutional purpose has been served, and there is no longer a need for the process to be prolonged.

Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll .