Quotes About Progress

Sus piernas terminaban todavía en aquellas lamentables pezuñas, y los cuernos de su frente eran tan agudos como antes...».

Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men's reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn't reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.

Cities change.

If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-minded way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts.

Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.

Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Dogma in science really is humiliating when it is recognized as dogma.

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago.

In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.

Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is a project, and progress is dificult.

that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.

We can't say, Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century.

I remember feeling the jolt of history when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. For many of us, that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.

Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine.

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.

You can accept what is in the present moment even while working to change it.

Life is not a noun, it's a verb.