Quotes about Change

Indeed, not just the problems but the loud cry "Reform!" had been heard here and there for centuries before Luther.

Wilberforce is having thoughts now that seem utterly strange and foreign.

What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia.

He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good.

Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed.

When Wilberforce's mother and grandfather sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, they hadn't the slightest idea that they were sending the boy into a glowing hotbed of Methodism.

Two changes manifested themselves right away: the first was a new attitude toward money, the second toward time.

But most extraordinary—and evidence to Mrs. Wilberforce of a "Great Change" indeed, though one she certainly welcomed—was a marked absence of that irritability and harsh temper he had sometimes displayed, especially toward her.

He knew that, if left to do as he liked, he might fritter away the rest of his life, just as he'd frittered away so many years already. He knew that he didn't want to go back to where he had been before, and he would take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that he continued on the new path he was now on.

Wilberforce's time at Cambridge over two hundred years ago sounds extraordinarily like the experience of many college students today.

That too seems unnecessarily severe, but we mustn't judge too harshly, for those who have gone through anything like a dramatic conversion usually stagger a bit too far in one direction before they correct their course and learn where the best forward path lies.

Of the many societal problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.