If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
New Year Quotes
Edmund Burke, in 1791, gave the most useful advice for the occasion: you can never plan the future by the past. The page is built from the pages on change, hope, the future and time, with Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Horace and Byron supplying most of the entries. It has no New Year collection behind it.
If you want something about resolutions, the Change page has better material. The famous line about a small group of citizens changing the world, credited to Margaret Mead, is marked disputed. Nobody has found where it comes from.
Most quoted on new year:
The future survives because people care. Live responsibly or die.
Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next.
In the hour's short space comes swift death, or joyful victory.
God perchance will by a happy change restore these things to a settled condition.
All things, said an ancient saw, may be hoped for by a man as long as he lives.
May I not so much be lost as would have
No time to look at myself
Ever.
Sancho Panza by name, is my own self, if I was not changed in my cradle.