Quotes About Progress

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually.

The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Those who cannot begin do not finish.

Be game--take a chance--don't hide behind veils and veils of discretion... Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them. You are new evidence, fresh and young. Your work, the spirit of youth, you are the progress of human evolution. If age dulls you it will be time enough then to be ponderous and heavy--or quit. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be young, to continue growing--not to settle and accept.

There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.

The brain can be a wonderful tool, can be a willing slave, as has been evidenced by some men, but of course it works poorly when it has not the habit of usage. An automobile can become a source of delight, but the first time you drive you are as apt to go up a tree as to go up the road.

It is an effort to stop evolution, to hold things back to the plane of your judgment. It is a check on a great adventure of human life. It is negative to the idea that youth should go forward. It is for the coming generation to judge you, not for you to judge it. So it must happen, whether you will it or not.

No pains. No gains

Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old.

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.

A young country does not serve as the pad on which England drew its sketches for the immense Gulags of the twentieth century without acquiring a few marks and scars.

weird ideas spark innovation because each helps companies do at least one of three things: (1) increase variance in available knowledge, (2) see old things in new ways, and (3) break from the past. These are the three basic organizing principles for innovative work

is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

Organizations that learn from their failures forgive and remember, they don't forgive and forget.

If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure.

Einstein said, "A person who has never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Focus on "pulling the plug" on failed ideas more quickly, not on reducing your failure rate.

all great technologies are blends of other technologies.

managers continue to use methods that force people to see old things in old ways, expecting new and profitable ideas somehow to magically appear.

people "who don't have a chance to take revenge are forced, in a sense, to move on and focus on something different.

That "telling them where they stand, while giving them the chance to try a new environment, is often enough to get them to change their behavior.

variation leads to excellence in social systems

innovative companies need a wide range of ideas and that success requires a high failure rate.