Parris Glendening Quotes

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counter-power, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight.

The only weapon I have is my microphone and my unmistakable faith as a militant for change, veritable change.”

Those who govern us know it well, for they would sooner deny us bread than dare alter the observance of tradition.

Reform means difficulties. History moves often by leaps, then it moves slowly, because the resistance is organizing itself.

The function of a progressive is to keep on protesting until things get so bad that a reactionary demands reform.

Only force would produce social change.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on.

One of the reasons that change takes place is that the people who produce it believe change can take place.

The reformer does not want to move left; he wants to move forward.

I am for the restoration of order, not for the restoration of the old order.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

Change is strong, but habit is strong too; and you cannot change the old for new, like a garment.