Quotes About Progress

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, men thought that the earth was flat, and that where earth and heaven met, the world ended. Yet when they finally set sail for that tremendous place, they sailed right through it, and found themselves back again where they had started from. It taught them only that the earth was round. It might have taught them more.

Now a new era had dawned upon the world, which quivered with the impact of tremendous forces, of discoveries and inventions. Man rode upon the air, sent his voice across the seas, divided the indivisible, and penetrated the impenetrable. Audacious, optimistic, and indefatigable, he might even forget God altogether, and raise his limitless towers like altars to none other than himself.

the minarets now seemed to me as profuse in Istanbul as smokestacks in Pittsburgh.

I haven't turned into Richard Harding Davis.

Time flies. It's up to you to be the navigator.

Don't think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.

There will be no further evolution without conscious evolution. - Robert Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness

Robert Ornstein

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

When things need to change, think S.C.A.M.P.E.R. -- coined by Bob Eberle:

I have to try and change the landscape, whatever it is.

The hill road wound upwards, as hill roads do, unless you're coming down them, of course.

Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Creative people are notoriously the slowest to adopt new technology.

I want to push technology boundaries to be more efficient.

What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can't imagine until you come up with the idea. It's idea-based. You can do anything.

When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, hi religion, we had better make certain to replace it with SOMETHING OF VALUE

When man made fire, he lifted himself up, over, and above the animals. Fire is actually too good for people. Let us sit in front of one of these tiny, gleaming blazes and drink a little gin.

Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man…. Lo! I show you the last man. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like the ground flea; the last man lives longest.

The spiritual level of a civilization can be measured by the amount of objective art it generates. By this criterion, our technological civilization is not much better than a gadget-infested barbarism.

[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.