A Quote by H. L. Mencken

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

H. L. Mencken

Quote Topics

Change Consists Delusion Form Hopeful Mainly Men Politics Practise Substance World

Quote Author

H. L. Mencken
American - Writer
September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956

You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.

Alasdair Gray

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

Kate Millett

No form remains permanently in a substance; a constant change takes place, one form is taken off and another is put on.

Maimonides

If you care about real change, deep structural change, that involves politics, and all politics is friction. It takes leadership, and the willingness to create that friction, that leads to social change.

Nick Hanauer

We are bringing women into politics to change the nature of politics, to change the vision, to change the institutions. Women are not wedded to the policies of the past. We didn't craft them. They didn't let us.

Bella Abzug

Every so often we hear people clamor for a change. Let's change the Constitution, change the form of Government, change everything for better or worse except to change the only thing that needs changing first: The human heart and our standard of success and human values.

William J. H. Boetcker

Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.

Naomi Klein

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts won't satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent. And isn't discontent the lever of change?

John Steinbeck

I believe the medium of film is one of the most powerful tools in the modern era to create positive social change. It has the ability to put big, complex, and controversial subjects across in an easy-to-understand and digestible form. It has the power to change someone's perspective on the world in a very short space of time - film has the power to change the world itself.

Sam Branson

Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.

Herbert Marcuse

Form can only be destroyed accidentally, i.e., on account of its connexion with substance, the true nature of which consists in the property of never being without a disposition to receive form.

Maimonides

What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.

Rachel Held Evans

Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.

Emma Goldman

My being consists of matter and form, that is, of soul and body; annihilation will reach neither of them, for they were never produced out of nothing. The consequence is, that every part of me will serve to make something in the world; and this again will change into another part through an infinite succession of change. This constant method of alteration gave me my being, and my father before me, and so on to eternity backward: for I think I may speak thus, even though the world be confined within certain determinate periods.