Quotes About Progress

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

You know when transformation happens? Right now. It's a present activity. Who is the new you? Show me the new you.

I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be." EINSTEIN

You can't start over. There's no such thing as starting over. There's only history. And right now you're making tomorrow's history. So go out, and do something that will be fun to remember.

His faith in the new industry, his advice, and his constant financial support were the factors that led to its spectacular development; otherwise it might have taken many more years for it to reach its tremendous proportions."9

George Westinghouse, like Edison, thought money was important only as a form of "stored energy" to use as he wished in his work and expand his businesses. He was interested not in being rich, but in helping the world. He strove incessantly to deliver better, more reliable products.

Here's what it all boils down to: To become the differentiator, you need to always be learning.

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

Between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of married women who worked had nearly doubled, and the number of married women in the professions had risen by 40 percent, Collier noted. "The question, therefore, is no longer, should women combine marriage with careers, but how?"23

Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of PhDs awarded to women doubled, and then, for three decades, it fell.6 The gains made by women in the beginning of the twentieth century were lost, everywhere, as women who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs found that they were barred from the top ranks of the academy. No structural changes had been made that would have allowed women to pursue a life of the mind while raising children: many quit; many were kicked out; most gave up.

Is progress the progress of Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous Customs in the world, considering us as a Civilised and a Christian Countrey, that we deny the advantages of Learning to Women." Like

In 1880, clerks made up less than 5 percent of the nation's workforce, nearly all of them men; by 1910, more than four million Americans worked in offices, and half were women. By 1920, most Americans lived and worked in cities.

The only way to answer the question "Are things getting better or are they getting worse?" is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, "facts"—particular explanations for how the world works—had replaced "truth"—a general understanding of the meaning of its existence.

In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, "a sum so small," he wrote, "that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.

Replacing "progress" with "innovation" skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

A ROBOT COMPUTER WILL GIVE CBS THE FASTEST REPORTING IN HISTORY," read the headline.31 The UNIVAC would stay in Philadelphia—it was too big to move—but in New York, CBS would install a fake, a console lit, from the inside, by a string of Christmas lights. The first computer most Americans ever saw was an empty shell: a stunt.

The turn from reverence to inquiry, from mystery to history, was crucial to the founding of the United States.

They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. —Abraham Lincoln, "Fragments on Government," 1854

Liberals argued for progress; conservatives argued for a return to the nation's founding principles. Change is a founding principle, too, but people divided by schism are blind to what they share: one half, infallible; the other, never wrong.

Masculine systems."77 That women were left out of the nation's founding documents, and out of its founders' idea of civil society, considered, like slaves, to be confined to a state of nature, would trouble the political order for centuries.

in 1916, only 16 percent of Americans lived in homes with electricity, but by 1927, that percentage had risen to 63.118

Maybe one day it would happen. Maybe one day her life would start going according to plan instead of spluttering and stalling like some clapped-out old banger.