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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.

Random quote on New Year

Most quoted on new year:

Try not to change the world. You will fail. Try to love the world. Lo, the world is changed. Changed forever.

Sri Chinmoy Meditations: Food For The Soul (1970)

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

Abraham Lincoln The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1866)

"I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."

J. R. R. Tolkien

Is not man born with a love of change — an Englishman to be discontented — an Anglo-Indian to grumble?

Richard Francis Burton

But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.

John Maynard Keynes The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.

Jimmy Wales

Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.

Stephen Baxter Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

Nothing is impossible for a man with a strong will. The possible is in store only for a man who loves the future. There is no word "impossible" in the Korean language.

Kim Jong-il

The right to hope is the most powerful human motivation I know.

Aga Khan IV

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

Dejan Stojanovic The Creator (2000)

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

Margaret Wheatley Turning to one another (2002)

He takes every change that has taken place over the past two hundred years as a personal affront.

Michael Kurland A Study in Sorcery (1989)

In our time the science of Sufism is desolate.

Ali Hujwiri The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.

Dai Sijie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)

Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (2000)

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994)

The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today.

R. A. Lafferty It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)

When you know nothing, you are free to hope.

Gregory Benford Beyond Infinity (2004)

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.

Malcolm X Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.

Charles Sanders Peirce Collected Papers (1931)

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