A Quote by Carolyn Heilbrun

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

Carolyn Heilbrun

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About Always Anticipate Both Change Conservatives Disaster Expect Profound Revolutionaries Social Social Change Thinking Utopia While Wrong

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Carolyn Heilbrun
American - Author
January 13, 1926 - October 9, 2003

Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.

Howard Zinn

I think that, especially among conservatives, there's a clear understanding that there are three legs to the conservative stool. There are the free-market economics conservatives, the social conservatives, and the national-security conservatives.

John Bolton

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

Michael Crichton

I represent an emerging group of leaders within the Jewish community who are conservatives; not just fiscal conservatives, but social conservatives as well.

Adam Hasner

There are libertarian conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and social conservatives. I feel conservative in terms of limited government, individual responsibility, self-sufficiency - that sort of thing.

Ted Olson

I've always been interested in how things change, in social change. I was involved in the animal rights movement as a young woman, I've been involved in thinking about gender and issues around racism and so on.

Gail Bradbrook

As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.

Leon Trotsky

The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories. They have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the past and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals.

Saul Alinsky

I don't wish to defend everything that has been done in the name of Utopia. But I think many of the attacks misconceive its nature and function. As I have tried to suggest, utopia is not mainly about providing detailed blueprints for social reconstruction. Its concern with ends is about making us think about possible worlds. It is about inventing and imagining worlds for our contemplation and delight. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of the human condition.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

Italo Calvino

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

Alan Kay

You actually see liberals checking 'Fox News,' if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you're seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what 'The New York Times' is thinking.

Evgeny Morozov

You can't expect to go about change - especially change of this nature, when you talk about racial equality and justice - you can't expect to go about or engage in that without resistance, and so you're going to have some people who aren't on board.

Malcolm Jenkins

Social media is the wrong place to judge what India is thinking about.

Parineeti Chopra

I think that one of the errors that social conservatives made - particularly Christian social conservatives - was a belief that they needed to use the power of government to try to shore up the various things that they believe make up a life well-lived.

Ben Domenech

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has.

Albert Ellis

A Quote by Carolyn Heilbrun

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