Upheavals Quotes & Sayings

When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household. — Aliette De Bodard

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can't claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent. — Stefan Zweig

In the early stages the sexual needs will have the upper hand, in later stages the compulsive moralistic inhibition. At times of political upheavals of the total social organization, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. This will impress some people as the "collapse of morality," other people as "sexual revolution." At any rate, the idea of the "decline of culture" is the perception of the breakthrough of natural sexuality. The only reason why it is experienced subjectively as "decline" is the fact that it threatens the compulsive moralistic way of living. What happens objectively is only the downfall of the sexual dictatorship which maintains the compulsive moralistic forces in the individuals in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family. — Wilhelm Reich

I want to successfully make the transition from a life in professional sports to another life, without running into major upheavals. — Oliver Kahn

Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicenter to be easily predictable. — Tana French

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins - all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, waste space. The first real event since the long interruption was this vertiginous home-coming by train, in the knowledge that his home was still safe, still existing somewhere, with every smallest stone in it dear to him. This was the point of life, this was experience, this was the quest of adventure seekers and what artists had in mind - this coming home to your family, to yourself, this renewal of life. — Boris Pasternak

Among all the upheavals of war with al Qaeda, the surest indicator of the historic stakes is the ongoing rotation of top U.S. government managers - scores at a time - into a bunker deep underground and far from Washington. — Barton Gellman

The Truth about America's Silicon Valley-
Angels in the Silicon

Riveting and insightful regarding progressivism and the social upheavals living in the Silicon Valley.-

John Yoo, UC Berkeley Constitutional Lawyer, novelist, and public servant — Richard Theodor Kusiolek

In dealing with emotional upheavals triggered by transitions and change, I have learned that the best place to start is to take my emotions to God. — Ngina Otiende

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. — Elizabeth Bowen

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for the Next Big Thing. We're growing bored with the ordinary means of God's grace, attending church week in and week out. Doctrines and disciplines that have shaped faithful Christian witness in the past are often marginalized or substituted with newer fashions or methods. The new and improved may dazzle us for a moment, but soon they have become "so last year". Michael Horton, Ordinary, 16 — Michael S. Horton

In spite of its poverty, its political upheavals, its lack of resources, Haiti is not a peripheral place. Its history has made it a center. — Yanick Lahens

Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability. — Rebecca Solnit

God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others. — Alexander Pushkin

It cannot be doubted that the world crisis and the suffering and privations of the people resulting from the crisis are in some measure responsible for the dangerous upheavals of which we are the witness. In such periods discontent breeds hatred, and hatred leads to acts of violence and revolution, and often even to war. — Albert Einstein

Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. — Adolf Hitler

It is almost impossible to understand the extent to which upheaval agitated, and by that very fact had temporarily enriched, the mind of M. de Charlus. Love in this way produces real geological upheavals of thought. In the mind of M. de Charlus, which only several days before resembled a plane so flat that even from a good vantage point one could not have discerned an idea sticking up above the ground, a mountain range had abruptly thrust itself into view, hard as rock
but mountains sculpted as if an artist, instead of taking the marble away, had worked it on the spot, and where there twisted about one another, in giant and swollen groupings, Rage, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Suffering, Pride, Astonishment, and Love. — Marcel Proust

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals. — N. T. Wright

Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone
many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child. — Elizabeth Hardwick

For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation? — Ronald Reagan

The old dead trees are the most fascinating - the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they'll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees. — Phillip Adams

We are like the little branch that quivers during a storm, doubting our strength and forgetting we are the tree - deeply rooted to withstand all life's upheavals. — Dodinsky

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have been overshadowed by the upheavals in the region. I have followed events there for almost 40 years. I am convinced that what is needed for a solution is not only the willingness to negotiate in good faith but also to take into account the needs and sensibility of the negotiating partner. I, for one, just cannot believe that the value of settlements for Israel is bigger than the damage these settlements do as an obstacle to peace. — Heinz Fischer

A history of nightlife!
what an interesting concept. A history of a people, told not through their daily travails and successive political upheavals, but via the changes in their nightly celebrations and unwindings. History is, in this telling, accompanied by a bottle of Malbec, some fine Argentine steak, tango music, dancing, and gossip. It unfolds through and alongside illicit activities that take place in the multitude of discos, dance parlors, and clubs. Its direction, the way people live, is determined on half-lit streets, in bars, and in smoky late-night restaurants. This history is inscribed in songs, on menus, via half-remembered conversations, love affairs, drunken fights, and years of drug abuse. — David Byrne

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization. — Wilhelm Dilthey

There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make fotr the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas ... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the blink of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. — Edgar Cayce

He saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century - naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire - which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism. — Thomas Frank

You're only two handshakes away from evil ... Maybe it's the same thing with goodness. We're never far from what's good ... It doesn't seem like such a far-fetched idea that it takes only 36 people to keep evil at bay. Just remember that all of the upheavals in world history, both good and bad, were initiated by individuals. — A.J. Kazinski

If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country. — George Papandreou

Freedom has more often been lost in small steps by progressive incrementalism, than it has been by catastrophic upheavals such as violence or war. — James Madison

I came to understand that we do not change gradually, peacefully, over time, but that we undergo sudden upheavals that overthrow our best-laid plans, change our character and redesign the shape of our life, all in the matter of moments. — Catherine Delors

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death. — Donna Tartt

Some of life's moments mark a break in consciousness; others give rise to streams of scintillating, philosophical ideas or astonishing works of art; still others, to important meeting or profound personal upheavals. — Elie Wiesel

when the humanist revolution preached the stirring ideals of human liberty, human equality and human fraternity. Since 1789, despite numerous wars, revolutions and upheavals, humans have not managed to come up with any new value. All — Yuval Noah Harari

We want not only life but an intense awareness of being alive. The large tendency of our mechanical and standardized civilization is to blunt that awareness by surrounding us with ideas and forms that require the lowest degree of consciousness. One lives in it less by reflection than by reflex. The effect of the uniform blows with which the environment strikes us is to make us insensitive to any but the most violent stimuli; two-thirds of life ceases to exist for us because the valves of attention require cataclysmic upheavals before they will open. Lacking the capacity to be excited by any but the most gross and violent stimuli, we spend our lives in a frantic race with boredom. — Denham Sutcliffe

Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects; imperial decline and its attendant 'small wars'; collective political impotence in the face of distant upheavals with disruptive local impact. These are the threats that chauvinist politicians will be best placed to exploit, precisely because they lead so readily to anger and humiliation. — Tony Judt

In our vital need ... science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions about the meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself himself and his surrounding world. — Edmund Husserl

Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics. — Brian Greene

White Christian America had its golden age in the 1950s, after the hardships and victories of World War Ii and before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. June Cleaver was its mother, Andy Griffith was its sheriff, Norman Rockwell was its artist. and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were its ministers. — Robert P. Jones

We cannot be satisfied with things as they are. We cannot be satisfied to drift, to rest on our oars, to glide over a sea whose depths are shaken by subterranean upheavals. — John F. Kennedy

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. — George Orwell

Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals? — Anais Nin

It doesn't hurt, she explains. And there is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture. — Anthony Doerr

Upheavals come only when man is set on some particular way of life, and is called to forgo that. When the fixed desire is to do the Father's Will, then there is no real change. The leaving of home, town, country is but as the putting off a garment that has served its useful purpose. — A.J. Russell

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries. — Boris Pasternak

This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Great upheavals produce shock waves that widen cracks in political, economic, and security orders. Sometimes the old orders break. Yet it can be in the power of leaders and peoples to shape the directions of change. — Robert Zoellick

The traces of upheavals become more impressive when one moves a little higher, when one gets even closer to the foot of the great mountain ranges. There are still plenty of shell layers. We notice them, even thicker and more solid ones. — Georges Cuvier

The most important result of the encounter [in the preceding anecdote] is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth ... Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner's presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces, Yes, the earth is round, the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless. — Azar Nafisi

Things such as illnesses, setbacks, delays, discordant people and upheavals are tickets to paradise. — Scott Curran

Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance. — Jacob A. Riis

Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time ... Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits. — Marcel Proust

In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role. — Henry Kissinger

You think the end justifies the means, however vile. I tell you: the end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is tomorrow's life. Great ends cannot be attained by base means. You've proved that in all your social upheavals. The meanness and inhumanity of the means make you mean and inhuman and make the end unattainable. — Wilhelm Reich

The two [Greco-Roman and Latin] worlds also had enough unifying elements, however, to be considered a single continent. First of all, both the East and the West were the heirs to the Bible and to the ancient Church, which in both worlds refer beyond themselves to an origin that lies outside today's Europe, namely in Palestine. Secondly, both shared the idea of the Roman Empire and of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore of law and legal instruments. The last factor I would mention is monasticism, which throughout the great upheavals of history continued to be the indispensable bearer not only of cultural continuity but above all of fundamental religious and moral values, of the ultimate guidance of humankind. As a pre-political and supra-political force, monasticism was also the bringer of ever-welcome and necessary rebirths of culture and civilization. — Pope Benedict XVI

And God tries to gently drive the words of Caussade from the knowing of my head to the bleeding of the heart: You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is.1 A — Ann Voskamp

How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world - in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s - with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. — David Graeber

Lots of earthquakes and landslides and disturbances keep happening on a daily basis simply because the mountain is growing. The same is true with human life: if one is striving to grow, earthquakes and landslides keep happening in one's life.
Those who are stagnant, who don't grow, their life seems to be stable and steady, and looks better. But it's lifeless. For one who is striving to grow, an enormous amount of upheaval happens in his life. But all the upheavals are worth a little bit of growth that could happen within a human being. — Jaggi Vasudev

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes. — Doris Lessing

The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic," the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. "Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease. — Jaron Lanier

Countries with lots of unmarried young men are the most vulnerable to sudden upheavals - this is what fueled the Arab Spring. — Tyler Cowen

Here they are, all in one place. Circle back to them when you need some poetic shine.
It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days,
but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze. — Boris Pasternak

You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is. — Jean-Pierre De Caussade

It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts. — Martin Luther

they found considerable plasticity from the onset of puberty into the early twenties. Once this was discovered, it became obvious that the upheavals of adolescence and early adulthood coincide with a previously unrecognized sensitive period of brain maturation in the prefrontal cortex — Louis Cozolino

As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness. — Scott McClellan

In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events. — Georg Simmel

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals. — Nick Clooney

[The blame for the future 'plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships. — Frederick Soddy

Conflicts and factions, violence and upheavals are caused by the neglect of human values in daily life. — Sathya Sai Baba

The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives — Hunter S. Thompson

They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. . . . — George Orwell

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received. — Whitley Strieber

The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples ... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought ... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation. — Gustave Le Bon

In these times there is a powerful demarcation between the surface and the deep currents of human development. Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface. But there is another and deeper change in progress. It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions. The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend. On the surface there is the battle of institutions, the illustration of events, the strife between peoples. On the surface there is propaganda and there is the effort to force opinions. The deeper current carries no propaganda. The shock of the surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course. It is in search of fundamental principle; that basic principle of all, which in degree as it is apprehended points the way to beauty and order, and to the law of nature. — Robert Henri

Our planet has a peculiar wobble - its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. — Howard Bloom

Perhaps, when we examine the causes of many social changes and political upheavals, we will find the marks of its presence and its principal ideals. — Ali Khamenei

If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself. — Harold Rosenberg

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments. — William S. Burroughs

These Reformation wars involved the biggest population movements in Europe between the 'barbarian' upheavals which dismantled the western Roman Empire and the twentieth century's First and Second World Wars. Hundreds of thousands of people decided to follow the example of the English, quit Europe and brave the terrors of the Atlantic to find a new life in north America. As early as 1662 some of the Duke of Savoy's Waldensian victims in the Alpine valleys took ship for a sympathetic Dutch Reformed colony; they found a new safe home on Stateri Island, amid the great natural haven which would become New York.3 — Diarmaid MacCulloch

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness. — Vladimir Nabokov