If you had £10 million to make one change to the world, what would that be? This week a prize fund is launched. Horizon: The £10 Million Challenge, Professor Alice Roberts, BBC 2014
A man can transform his shit, Jim. The Gambler 2014 starring Mark Wahlberg & John Goodman & Brie Larson & Michael K Williams & Jessica Kange & Anthony Kelly & Alvin Ing & Domenick Lombardozzi & Emory Cohen & Steve Park & Leland Orser & George Kennedy et al, director Rupert Wyatt, black gangster
… If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
The times they are a-changin’. Bob Dylan, title of song
Everything is irreversibly changing. Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe 1/4: Destiny, BBC 2011
Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. Miriam Beard
People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely. Steven Pinker
But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
There are two small islets off the Croatian coast called Pod Kopiste and Pod Mrcaru. In 1971 a population of common Mediterranean lizards, Podarcis sicula, which mainly eat insects, was present on Pod Kopiste but there were none on Pod Mrcaru. In that year experimenters transported five pairs of Padarcis sicula from Pod Kopiste and released them on Pod Mrcaru ... Herrel and his colleagues made observations on the descendants of the transported lizards and compared them with lizards living on the original ancestral island. There were marked differences. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth pp113-114
The Lenski experiments are distressing to creationists, and for a very good reason. They are a beautiful demonstration of evolution in action ... E. coli is a common bacterium ... These twelve flasks founded twelve lines of evolution that we destined to be kept separate from one another for two decades and counting ... Each tribe had a new flask every day ... This means about 7,000 ‘flask generations’ and 45,000 bacterial generations ... different tribes developed different sets of mutation. ibid. pp117-121
I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago … Oh, she had changed! Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool girl who applies shared cosmetic with grubby fingers to an unwashed face and does not mind what soiled texture, what postulate epidermis comes in contact with her skin … A course flush had now replaced that innocent fluorescence. Vladimir Nabokov
You promised you’d stop smoking when I did. You promised you’d go back to the gym. You promised you’d try drinking red wine instead of beer. You promised you’d come on holiday with me … You promised things would change. Shaun of the Dead 2004 starring Sean Pegg & Nick Frost & Kate Ashfield & Lucy Davis & Dylan Moran & Penelope Wilton & Bill Nighty & Jessica Stevenson & Martin Freeman & Reece Shearsmith et al, director Edgar Wright, her to him
By the end of his first term Obama had realized Change was harder than he had predicted. Inside Obama’s White House IV: The Arc of History, BBC 2016
You can change what you do, but not what you want. Peaky Blinders s3e3, Tommy, BBC 2016
Because one day things might change. Peaky Blinders s5e5: The Shock, asylum loonie declining Tommy’s suicide capsule
‘They want a change: political and economic.’ Grin Without a Cat aka The Base of the Air is Red, 1977
Remember, when someone says ‘you’ve changed’ it usually just means you’ve stopped living your life their way. Ricky Gervais, Twitter 22nd October 2013
He was the phenomenon of the 1920s. We think at that time he was as well known as Lindbergh – it’s really quite astonishing. Zelig 1983 starring Woody Allen & Mia Farrow & Patrick Horgan & John Buckwalter & Susan Sontag & Saul Bellow & Bruno Bettelheim & Irving Howe & John Morton Blum & Ada Bricktop Smith et al, director Woody Allen
He spoke adoringly of Coolidge and the Republican Party all in an upper-class Boston accent. ibid.
On his deathbed Maurice Zelig tells his son that Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering and the only advice he gives him is to save string. ibid.
You just told the truth and it sold papers: it had never happened before. ibid. journalist
Not everyone however was entranced with the human chameleon. ibid.
The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely extremely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. Now I myself felt his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist. ibid. doctor
I have this masturbation class. If I’m not there they start without me. ibid. Zelig
In the middle of the meal Zelig begins to turn Greek. ibid.
We need to start putting together a plan: we need change – put a halt to the arrests, prison releases, maybe even reform the Church. The Death of Stalin 2017 starring Steve Buscemi & Simon Russell Beale & Paddy Considine & Rupert Friend & Jason Isaacs & Michael Palin & Andrea Riseborough & Jeffrey Tambor & Adrian McLoughlin et al, director Armando Iannucci, Krushchev
The chaos that they’re going to have to bring about in order to change us over into the New World Order system they want is the only thing that will in some way free things up for a change to happen in a different direction. The Corbett Report online 2018 ‘Can Chaos Be Good?’
You’re not going to change. Look around ya, I mean what’s going to change? Do you think it’s going to be any different next week, next month? It’s going to be the same goddamn thing. The Verdict 1982 starring Paul Newman & Charlotte Rampling & Jack Warden & James Mason & Milo O’Shea & Lindsay Crouse & Edward Binns & Julie Bovasso & Roxanne Hart & James Handy & Wesley Addy & Joe Seneca et al, director Sidney Lumet, Mickey
The paradox of our time is that humanity is becoming simultaneously more unified and more fragmented. That is the principal thrust of contemporary change. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era ch1
In our time the routinization of conflict has also meant a shift from sustained warfare to sporadic outbreaks of violence. ibid.
The impact of science and technology on man and his society, especially in the more advanced countries of the world, is becoming the major source of contemporary change. ibid.
But while our immediate reality is being fragmented, global reality increasingly absorbs the individual, involves him, and even occasionally overwhelms him. ibid.
The United States: A major disruptive influence on the world scene … No other society so massively disseminates its own way of life and values. ibid.
Marxism, born of the social upheaval produced by the combined effects of the industrial and nationalist revolutions provided a unique intellectual tool for understanding and harnessing the fundamental forces of our time. ibid. ch3
America’s relationship with the world must reflect American domestic values and preoccupations. ibid. ch5
The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen in addition to the more customary data.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them.
This will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technetronic era, a dictatorship, leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them. Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function like men and reason with them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions. ibid.
Society dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. ibid.
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ibid.