Quotes About Progress

A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.

We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal.

But if the views of some migrant communities on homosexuality were only a couple of generations out of date, the views of portions of those communities on the subject of women were shown to be out of date by many centuries, at least.

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody's ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.

the place of a history or tradition, we got instead the talk of "values" only, as though those values came from nowhere or could be invented afresh. In the name of great openness, we became close-minded, and in the name of progress, we absorbed ideas that turned out to be highly regressive.

we seem to have decided that the individual complexities which actually exist not just between women and men but within men and within women can simply be pushed to one side with the assumption that they have all been overcome.

Among the things these issues all have in common is that they have started as legitimate human rights campaigns. This is why they have come so far. But at some point all went through the crash barrier. Not content with being equal, they have started to settle on unsustainable positions such as 'better'. Some might counter that the aim is simply to spend a certain amount of time on 'better' in order to level the historical playing field.

There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds.

With regard to women's rights and sexual-minority rights, and, of course, in particular when it came to the issue of racism, everything was presented as though it had never been worse at the point at which it had never been better.

And the divide between the gays who wanted equality and those who wanted to use being gay merely as a first step to tearing down some other order or forming some new sort of society persisted.

In 1991 Susan Faludi published Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. A year later Marilyn French (bestselling author of The Women's Room in 1977) repeated the trick with The War Against Women. These hugely successful books thrived on the notion that although rights had been achieved there was now a concerted campaign under way to roll that progress back.

Among the things these issues all have in common is that they have started as legitimate human rights campaigns. This is why they have come so far. But at some point all went through the crash barrier.

Allowing people to live their lives the way they wish is an idea which reveals some of the most cherished attainments of our societies – attainments which are still disturbingly rare worldwide.

Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.

One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.

How high did I get?" I wanted to know.

In the best classrooms, grades are only one of many types of feedback provided to students.

It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

The company's stellar growth revived more than a few economic sectors, as well as a few neighborhoods.

Growth is good, at least for those doing the growing.

The industrialist's dream was to replace them entirely—with machines.

The screen is encroaching on the eye, from TVs to computer monitors to phone screens to smart watches to VR goggles to tiny LEDs that project images onto the retina to neural implants that communicate directly with the optic nerve.