Quotes About Progress

The only way round is through.

Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.

Buffett quoted Keynes: "The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in escaping from the old ones." Buffett

Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.

He loves his country best who strives to make it best.

A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

As man develops, he places a greater value upon his own rights. Liberty becomes a grander and diviner thing. As he values his own rights, he begins to value the rights of others. And when all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized.

If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone.

Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.

Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?

The religionist is a living fossil, embedded in that rock called faith.

Is it a small thing to quench the flames of hell with the holy tears of pity -- to unbind the martyr from the stake -- break all the chains -- put out the fires of civil war -- stay the sword of the fanatic, and tear the bloody hands of the Church from the white throat of Science? Is it a small thing to make men truly free -- to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power -- the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of the earth the fiend of fear?

The intellectual advancement of man depends upon how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

The theologians dead, knew no more than the theologians now living.

I know not what discoveries, what inventions, what thoughts may leap from the brain of the world. I know not what garments of glory may be woven by the years to come. I cannot dream of the victories to be won upon the fields of thought; but I do know, that coming from the infinite sea of the future, there will never touch this 'bank and shoal of time' a richer gift, a rarer blessing than liberty for man, for woman, and for child .

Religion has not civilized man - man has civilized religion. God improves as man advances.

Men and women desire each other, and this desire is a condition of civilization, progress, and happiness, and of everything of real value. But there is this profound difference in the sexes: in man this desire is the foundation of love, while in woman love is the foundation of this desire.

There is not the slightest danger of women becoming too intellectual or knowing too much. Neither is there any danger of men knowing too much. At least, I know of no men who are in immediate peril from that source.

How fortunate it is for us all that it is somewhat unnatural for a human being to obey. Universal obedience is universal stagnation; disobedience is one of the conditions of progress.

but if there is the smallest seed of good in any human heart, let kindness fall upon it until it grows, and in that way I know, and so do you, that the world will get better and better day by day.

We aren't our mistakes. It's what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.

But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it's bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who's radically different to the person they were forty years ago?" "I don't know . . . I think I've changed," said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud. Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said, "Yeah. But you're exceptional, aren't you?

It's like a maze. Moment I start thinking I'm getting somewhere, I turn a corner and come up against a dead end. Or find myself back where I started.