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.
Interpretation
Significant changes can destabilize existing systems, but they also provide opportunities for leaders and people to influence the future.
This quote reflects on how major disruptions in society—such as political revolutions, economic crises, or security challenges—can create weaknesses in the established order. However, it emphasizes that these situations are also moments of potential empowerment, where both leaders and citizens have the ability to steer the course of transformation towards a better future.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about political reforms to emphasize the potential for constructive change.
You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.
Thomas Jefferson believed that to preserve the very foundations of our Nation, we would need dramatic change from time to time. Well, my fellow Americans, this is our time. Let us embrace it.
We all have the chance to create a world where extreme poverty is the exception rather than the rule.
The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.
If current technological processes continue without change, the environment will change, and we, the human species, will either have to mutate or even die, to disappear, as many species have disappeared.
You can change all things for the better when you change yourself for the better.
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