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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:

Quantitative change eventually gives way to qualitative change.

Liu Cixin A View from the Stars (2024)

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.

James Anthony Froude The Science of History (1864)

There is never no hope left. Remember.

Larry Niven The Ringworld Engineers (1980)

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Marshall McLuhan The Mechanical Bride (1951)

A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

Michael Chabon The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)

Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.

Isaac Asimov The Foundation series (1951)

To Mankind
And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won, after all.

Isaac Asimov The Gods Themselves (1972)

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.

Steven Erikson House of Chains (2002)

What could not be changed must be endured.

Robert Jordan New Spring (2004)

I can feel a something pounding in my brain
Just any time that someone speaks your name
Trumpets sound and I hear thunder boom
Every time that you walk in the room.

Jackie DeShannon When You Walk In The Room (1962)

Future leaders will be less concerned with saying what they will deliver and more concerned with delivering what they have said they would.

Dave Ulrich David Ulrich cited in: Stephen Covey (2006)

Hope is the possibility of always having something to achieve.

Luca Parmitano

I wish to fall ill that all my time may pass in seclusion with the Lord and be saved appearing in mass prayers.

Al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

My mission, the mission of my term, is to do everything in order to rebuild hope.

Isaac Herzog

I am the Proof of God for the created beings and I am a proof for the saints (awliya) of my time.

Sahl al-Tustari

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

Isaac Asimov The Foundation series (1951)

Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

H. G. Wells The First Men in the Moon (1901)

Very busy people always find time for everything.
Conversely, people with immense leisure find time for nothing.

Ernest Dimnet The Art of Thinking (1928)

Time, in all crises, is usually the ingredient missing to make a solution. It is best supplied by an agreement on a pause.

John Keegan The First World War (1998)

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