Quotes About Progress

Success! Success! The enemy of progress!

Leadership" is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along.

People asked us, "Do you read history?" "No," I answered. "We are too busy making it.

Universal orthodoxy is enriched by every new discovery of truth: what at first appeared universal, by wishing to stand still, sooner or later becomes a sect.

[T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.

It is hard to convince a high-school student that he will encounter a lot of problems more difficult than those of algebra and geometry.

An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.

Ideas carried out stimulate more ideas.

Even if you can not sculpt great foundations, because you have not got that sort of talent, at least carve a child's toy... Start SOMEWHERE. Do not let this desire be simply a frustration that turns into bitterness when it could grow and develop, given some small outlet..

[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

A race lacking respect for women would never advance socially or politically.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students. There has been no failure on our part in this regard considering how far they have gone.

You can never plan the future by the past.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

The march of the human mind is slow.

Young man, there is America—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.

The age of chivalry has gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.