Jeff Greenfield Quotes

Transformation in real life is extraordinarily incremental, and that's all I'm going to say.

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

Change is incremental. Change is small.

Real change happens a step at a time.

Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.

A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

In politics one should not expect big jumps. Everything takes time.

Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

… evolution over revolution.

I am always for change. But I believe in slow and inevitable change and not a forced one, all of a sudden.

Systemic change rarely comes overnight.

I'm an advocate of evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes.

I know that change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that it is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

All good work is done the way ants do things: Little by little.

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.

It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.

It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding.

If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.

True progress is slow but sure.