50 Powerful Quotations for People Leaders, Coaches, and Consultants Leading Change

Just a short year ago, many thought the world would return to some state of normal. But, with new COVID variants, high inflation, and massive quit rates in employment, the work world remains unpredictable.

2022 is a year of continuing volatility in the US workplace. 

This year, income gaps will grow, and inflation will cut wage increases. Demands for greater justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion will persist. And the access to services and technologies will remain uneven.

Will you have the leadership coaching you need to succeed this year and beyond? 

I've curated 50 of the best quotations on change to inspire and sustain your change leadership. Let’s put these ideas into motion in your professional and team development. 

1. If you want to truly understand something, try to change it. — Kurt Lewin

2. Organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources. — Henry Mintzberg

3. People respond positively to gratitude, and this response directly impacts both people’s generosity and their relationship to abundance. — Angeles Arrien

4. How do you change the world? One room at a time. Which room? The one you're in. — Peter Block

5. What you're thinking is what you're becoming. — Muhammad Ali

6. Change before you have to. — Jack Welch

7. People don’t resist change. They resist being changed! — Peter Senge

8. If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities. — Maya Angelou

9. I am reminded of how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be. — Warren Bennis

10. They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. — Andy Warhol

11. It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change. — Charles Darwin

12. Magic lies in challenging what seems impossible. — Carol Moseley Braun

13. Those that lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. — Blackfoot

14. Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. — John F. Kennedy

15. Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much. — Helen Keller

16. If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton

17. You can achieve far more than you believe possible, if you help others to become the heroes. — Ruth Tearle

18. The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic. — Peter Drucker

19. The action is in the interaction. ― Beverly Kaye

20. Understand that commitment to a major change is always expensive, and that you either pay for achieving it or pay for not having it. — Daryl Conner

21. Whatever got you here may well prevent you from getting there. — Marshall Goldsmith

22. All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns. — Bruce Lee

23. The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change. — Bill Clinton

24. I am lucky that whatever fear I have inside me, my desire to win is always stronger. — Serena Williams

25. To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. — Winston Churchill

26. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. — Buckminster Fuller

27. Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change. — Jim Rohn

28. Change is inevitable. Change is constant. — Benjamin Disraeli

29. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. — Victor Frankl

30. Trust is something that happens within people only when it is created between people. — Chip R. Bell

31. Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself. ― Chinua Achebe

32. The key challenge is how we continue to do deeper inner work so that our groundedness and our continuous fluid but evolving integrated self manages to help us to have congruence between our outside behavior and inner self. Finally, are we able to give a sense of inspiring and establishing presence when we work with people – so that by working with us people get a glimpse of ah, that is what this change is about – because I am experiencing the end game that we are meant to be heading towards (the embodiment of the end game). — Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge

33. Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history. — Joan Wallach Scott

34. Where there is no vision, the people perish. — Proverbs 29:18

35. You manage things; you lead people. — Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

36. If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing. — Benjamin Franklin

37. We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything. — Charles Handy 

38. Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin 

39. Change masters are – literally – the right people in the right place at the right time. The right people are the ones with the ideas that move beyond the organization’s established practice, ideas they can form into visions. The right places are the integrative environments that support innovation, encourage the building of coalitions and teams to support and implement visions. The right times are those moments in the flow of organizational history when it is possible to reconstruct reality on the basis of accumulated innovations to shape a more productive and successful future. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

40. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. — Alfred North Whitehead 

41. The manager, in today’s world, doesn’t get paid to be a steward of resources, a favored term not so many years ago. He or she gets paid for one and only one thing: to make things better (incrementally and dramatically), to change things, to act – today.— Tom Peters

42. We cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are. Max De Pree

43. A change of heart is the essence of all other change and it is brought about by a re-education of the mind. — Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence 

44. You can’t move so fast that you try to change the [norms] faster than people can accept it. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority. — Eleanor Roosevelt

45. Every organizational system has its own natural immune system whose task it is to resist unfamiliar, and so unrecognizable, signals. That is not necessarily bad. — William Bridges

46. But reflection without action is —ultimately as unproductive as action without reflection. — Robert Kegan

47. Culture is not a surface phenomenon, it is our very care. — Edgar Schein

48. Most change agents rely primarily on rational approaches to foster organizational change. 2. Most change initiatives actually involve significant non-rational dynamics and processes. 3. Most change agents still insist on operating as if organizational change is a purely rational process. — Robert Marshak

49. I learned to tell prospective clients shopping for the best (intervention, consultant, whatever) to talk to others first and come back to me if they could not find someone they liked. OD practice is a boutique affair. The product is you. Nobody else can do what you do. — Marvin Weisbord

50. We no longer seek the cause of events in the nature of a single isolated object, but in the relationship between an object and its surroundings. — Kurt Lewin

Let's continue to serve organizations and their leaders by embracing change with authenticity and integrity. We can create organizations that embrace values of respect and participation. Let's make 2022 a year of advancing your authentic leadership.