The Best Quotes on Change and Organizations

Enjoy these pearls of wisdom and famous quotes on organizational development and change.

"Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two"

Octavio Paz 1914-1998, Mexican poet and essayist

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit"

Henry Brooks Adams 1838-1919, American writer and historian

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"

Charles Darwin 1809-1882, English biologist and father of the evolution theory

"One of the things I learnt when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself I could not change others"

Nelson Mandela 1918-, Nobel prize winner, South African statesman and President since 1994

"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly"

Henri L. Bergson 1859-1941, French philosopher, 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature

"It's been a long time coming. But I know a change is gonna come"

Sam Cooke 1931-1964, American musician

"Kaizen is like a hotbed that nurtures small and ongoing changes, while innovation is like magma that appears in abrupt eruptions from time to time"

Masaaki Imai, Japanese change and quality management guru

"Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet"

Henry Mintzberg 1939- , renowned academic and writer on business and management

"Constant dripping hollows out a stone"

Lucretius 98-55 BC, Roman poet

"Social organizations are flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output into further energetic input consists of transactions between the organization and its environment"

Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn in The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966)

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has"

Margaret Mead 1901-1978, American cultural anthropologist

"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything"

John Kenneth Galbraith

"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me"

Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865, sixteenth American president

"We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules"

Alan Bennett

"Change is good - you go first"

>Kenneth F Murphy 1955-, former SVP HR of Altria Group and writer

"People don't resist change. They resist being changed!"

Peter Senge, management writer famous for the notion of the learning organization

"All things are in a state of flux"

Heraclites 540BC-480BC, Greek Philosopher

"Be the change you want to see in the world"

Mahatma Gandhi 1869-1948, political and spiritual leader of India

"Nothing is permanent, but change"

Heraclitus 535–475 BCE, pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future"

John F. Kennedy 1917-1963, 35th President of the United States

"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change"

Dr Wayne Dyer 1940-2015, American Psychologist

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