Man’s urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization — the man-made artifact to house successive generations — would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist

Essay (1969-02-27), “Reflections on Violence,” The New York Review of Books
    (Source)

Revised and collected in Crises of the Republic, "On Violence" (1972).