Time & Perspective Quote by Catherine Booth

“If we are to better the future we must disturb the present” is activism stripped down to its most inconvenient truth: progress is not a polite request, it’s an interruption. Catherine Booth, co-founder of the Salvation Army, wasn’t speaking from the comfort of abstract reform. She operated in the grind of Victorian Britain, where poverty was treated as personal failure, where “respectability” doubled as social control, and where women were expected to influence the world indirectly, if at all. In that setting, “disturb” is a deliberate provocation. It frames complacency as an active obstacle and makes disruption a moral duty rather than a tactic of last resort.

The line works because it reverses the usual emotional logic of change. People like to imagine the future arriving as a reward for good intentions, with the present left intact. Booth punctures that fantasy: any serious attempt to “better” what comes next will agitate whoever benefits from how things are now. “We” matters, too. She’s not giving permission to a heroic outsider; she’s drafting a collective subject, implicating the listener in the cost of improvement.

There’s also a subtle rebuttal to the era’s favorite critique of reformers: that they were unruly, unseemly, too loud. Booth folds that accusation into her argument. Yes, disturbance is the point. If the present is arranged to keep suffering quiet and contained, then causing a scene isn’t immaturity; it’s strategy.