Change is what political leadership is about.

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

"It will cause a great many changes."
"Yes, but one cannot prevent change simply by wishing it not to happen."

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it. The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. This accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological, consequences.

The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.

It is an essential part of our social tragedy that people, like farmers, the industrial workers, the medical profession, etc., influence the social process not only by their work, but also — and even predominantly — by political ideologies. For political activity hampers objective, rational activity; it splits professional organizations into warring ideological groups; it disorganizes the industrial workers: it restricts the work of the physician and harms the patients, etc. In brief, political activity prevents precisely what it pretends to achieve: peace, work, security, international cooperation, objective expression of opinion, freedom of belief, etc.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Politics affect lives and we all have to be politicians. You can be the one being voted for or the one voting for or the one volunteering in someone's campaign or helping to raise money or donating or giving governance or making demands.

[I]t is not true that we shall necessarily progress if our political conditions undergo a change, irrespectively of the manner in which it is brought about. If the means employed are impure, the change will not be in the direction of progress but very likely in the opposite.

Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.

Everything is political in one way or another. (1997)

For we are the party of change. We seek not to conserve but to transform society: industrial change to realize the vast potential abundance which has so long been denied; social change to redress the distorted balance between private self-seeking and social compassion; structural change which recognizes the challenge to our society brought about by uneven regional development and by the great challenge which is presented by the urban explosion in terms of the problems of transportation and social environment; change in the relationships within our society in an age which rejects the feudal and class relationships which others seek, in conserving, to perpetuate.