Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Wright

“Speak of change, and the world is in alarm” skewers a reflex that still runs our politics: people treat “change” as a reckless proposal rather than the water they’re already swimming in. Wright’s line works because it stages a miniature debate inside a single breath. First, she names the panic - not rational disagreement, but alarm, the body’s response. Then she flips the frame with a pointed, almost weary question: “And yet where do we not see change?” The rhetorical move is surgical. If change is everywhere, fear of change isn’t caution; it’s denial, or more often, a defense of who benefits from the present.

Wright was an activist in an era when “change” meant upheavals with real stakes: industrialization remaking work, democratic movements challenging inherited power, abolition and women’s rights pressing against the legal architecture of inequality. In that context, “alarm” wasn’t abstract. It was the soundtrack of elites and moral guardians warning that reform would dissolve society itself. Wright’s subtext: the status quo is already unstable, and appeals to “stability” are frequently a tactic to freeze hierarchies in place while change happens anyway - just unevenly, just quietly, and just to other people.

The quote’s intent isn’t to romanticize disruption; it’s to puncture the melodrama around it. Wright suggests that the honest question isn’t whether we’ll change, but who gets to steer it, and who gets told to be afraid.