Quotes About Progress

We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement

Lois McMaster Bujold

Damned technocrats. Nothing but horse doctors with a more expensive set of toys.

From spaceman to caveman in three days, she meditated aloud. How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it's really in our things.

The fastest way to get to easy is through hard.

A typical tech toy. High-end this year, everywhere next year, nowhere after that until the antiquarians revival.

Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

Had getting rid of his uneven limp, leg braces, and most of the crookedness in his back made that much difference? Or was the difference in the Barrayarans?

Don't worry whether or not I am now happy. Today is only chapter one, we have yet to write a book.

With the opposable thumb our ancestors made weapons, harnessed fire, fashioned tools and implements, created works of art, and hitch-hiked.

Our ingress into the world was naked and bare; our progress through the world is trouble and care; our egress from the world will be nobody knows where; but if we do well here we shall do well there.

Blind obedience was never what I wanted. Yet, you seem determined to keep us in the past, where every act, every response, is either black or white, when you know damned good and well our lives never existed on such a plane.

all the wild ways he had shown me, mosses and rushes and heather, the home of the curlew and snipe, and the grazing grounds of the geese, all those enchanted fields and the magical willows lying under the edge of the bog, all were to be spoiled, hidden, sold and disenchanted by that terrible force named Progress.

Rodriguez seldom concerned himself with the past, holding that the future is all we can order the scheme of. And maybe even here he was wrong.

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

At one time, Madison Street had been quietly residential, curving gently to a rural road below, but the city had reached out like a hungry blob of protoplasm and engulfed us.

You've got to continue to grow, or you're just like last night's corn bread-stale and dry.

Every day is a new day and you've got to just go with the flow.

I don't go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, Fine. I'm on page… and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.

You women today," Mrs. Mallon said. "You expect too much.

You'll never get ahead of anyone as long as you try to get even with him.