Chris Jordan Quotes

Most politicians will not stick their necks out unless they sense grass-roots support ... neither you nor I should expect someone else to take our responsibility.

I never looked at the masses as my responsibility. I can only love one person at a time. So I began. I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand.

There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us.

What we can do as individuals may not be very much on the global scale, but we have to start the change by living as we are teaching.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

I really believe in the power of the individual to make change, and our family is a real collection of individuals.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

We can't create change until we recognize and check our own actions.

The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.

Most of the time we do nothing, myself included, I think the lesson I learned from [playing humanitarian Tessa in The Constant Gardner] is that a lot of drops make up an ocean. If people would stand up and say what they believe in maybe we can make a difference. Helping one person is better than nothing. Just do something.

You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

It is in the power of every individual to do that which the community as a whole is powerless to effect.

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.

We've all got to look at ourselves, start with yourself, that's all you can do. I believe that we can act responsibly as a group, it's just that there are vested interests telling us not to bother.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

I can't change everything by myself but I can be one of the people who are trying to change the situation.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

People don't want to embrace culture shifts because it's not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.

So, what we do as individuals matters. It adds up.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

One person really can make a difference.

Change happens from the bottom up - all of us as individuals deciding that we will and we do have an impact.

People need to believe they can make a difference - that one person standing strong can turn the tide.