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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:

Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.

Herbert Spencer

And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

Phil Ochs The Broadside Tapes 1 (1960)

Nothing ever goes as you expect. Expect nothing, and you will not be surprised. Expect nothing. Hope for nothing. Nothing.

Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos (1994)

Now, this was all part of that hope and change and transparency, and now a year later I gotta ask those supporters of all that: "How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?"

Sarah Palin

My six and seventy years are through.
I was not born, I am not dead.
Clouds floating on the high wide skies
The moon curves through its million-mile course.

Yakuo Tokuken

I know I will almost certainly forget it all again, but I hope next time, I will be able to recall quickly. For this moment to become a movement, we have to keep trying to remember.

Lauren Duca Sexism, Remembered and Forgotten (2017)

Time never returns once lost.

Hyder Bux Jatoi

Life has a good future, especially when the CO2 tax comes...

Anna Heringer Gespräch mit den Lehmbauexperten (2017)

If I made a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.

Joss Whedon

Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.

John Steinbeck Tortilla Flat (1935)

When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.

Kenneth Tynan Tynan Right and Left (1967)

I don't understand the ones that have no sense of hope and invest in hate. That's not gonna work out, you know? It's a waste of your time!

Tom Petty Interview With Alan Bangs (1999)

Being an immortal doesn’t matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it.

Sheri S. Tepper The Visitor (2002)

We know that when change comes, no one is more adamant in holding on to the past than those in power. They know change is inevitable, but they would, if they could, parcel it out in measured pieces. Grain for chickens.

Jack McDevitt Ancient Shores (1996)

Forty years ago, my dad gave up a safe seat in Congress to run for governor and, finally, forty years later, we're gonna have a Larry Hogan in the governor's mansion.

Larry Hogan

Earth and metal ...
although my breathing ceases
time and tide go on.

Atsujin

Before Utu, I will not change my word.

Ishbi-Erra

From the sweet thoughts of home
And from all hope I was forever hurled.
For me—farthest from earthly port to roam
Was best, could I but shun the spot where man might come.

William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (1798)

I am still hopeful. A falcon, Time. But the coincidence is probably accidental.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.

Samuel Beckett Molloy (1951)

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