Quotes About Progress

He had let them down again. After a year, it was decided that the house would be completely revamped.

Searching for oil was wildly unpredictable, whereas refining seemed safe and methodical by comparison.

Before too long, he realized that refining was the critical point where he could exert maximum leverage over the industry.

He thought Jack might fare better in the new environment.

The sum total of these developments resulted in nothing less than a revolution in medical education.

What a blessing the oil has been to mankind!

What nobody could have foreseen in 1913 was that

By early 1873, he had crossed his own Rubicon and never looked back.

He seemed to age a generation.

but as John D. Rockefeller set about building his fortune, the absence of clear-cut rules probably aided, at first, the creative vigor of the new industrial economy.

he congratulated her for her better health

Rockefeller tried to expand his disbursements to keep pace with his mounting income, and his donations nearly doubled from $61,000 in 1881 to $119,000 three years later.

From an engineering standpoint, Pierpont knew little about railroads.

Like many donors, Rockefeller wished to give freely, but Harper was constantly trying to speed up the process.

Carnegie had seriously misjudged developments in the ore business.

George Washington always demonstrated a capacity to learn from missteps. "Errors once discovered are more than half amended," he liked to say. "Some men will gain as much experience in the course of three or four years as some will in ten or a dozen.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

The most remarkable leaps into the unknown are often not fully appreciated

Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance.

But being uncomfortable is a virtue, not a hindrance.

Curiosity-driven research may seem self-indulgent and far from the immediate public good. However, essentially all of our current quality of life, for people living in the first world, has arisen from the fruits of such research, including all the electric power that drives almost every device we use. Two

escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions

children will be able to tell than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future.

When it comes to understanding how our universe evolves, religion and theology have been at best irrelevant.