Quotes About Progress

change requires destruction, whether or not you value the destroyed.

Innovation is combinatorial. It combines old things to make the new.

This is one of nature's lessons for innovable technologies: If we want to open nature's black box of innovation, Ockham's razor is much too dull. Like oil and water, simplicity and innovability don't mix.

While in Europe aspiring Communists were motivated, above all, by the desire to ameliorate social injustices, the East Asian version of Communism had both social and nationalist dimensions. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the era when Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh were young idealists, Communism in East Asia was widely seen as a shortcut to the national revival and modernity, a way not only to solve social problems but also to leapfrog past stages of backwardness and colonial dependency.

she studies to be equal in a world that is no longer surprised at anything

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

A child doesn't have to be a prodigy. The only thing that matters is that he should't become 'stuck' in childishness

It is obvious to everyone that man's material aggrandisement has not been synchronous with spiritual progress. The point has been reached where we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good. We have created a civilisation which threatens to annihilate mankind.

There was no reason to get upset over one missed opportunity when so many more lay ahead.

I beat Saratoga for the first time, and I felt that I had come of age as a horseplayer.

show, he'd left for the second hotel

We cannot afford to lose the Negro. We have urgent need of all and more. Let us therefore turn our efforts to making the best of him.

Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.

Nothing man has discovered or imagined is to be named with the steam engine. It has no fellow. Franklin capturing the lightning, Morse annihilating space with the telegraph, Bell transmitting speech through the air by the telephone, are not less mysterious—being more ethereal, perhaps in one sense they are even more so—still, the labor of the world performed by heating cold water places Watt and his steam engine in a class apart by itself.

tall oaks from little acorns grow.

Pioneering don't pay.

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. Is is a never failing spring in the desert

thirty-five words long, sometimes longer.

Research knowledge of a complex phenomenon advances by comparing the relative contributions of different models.

Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state.

The line between the 'mechanical' and the 'intelligent' was very, very slightly blurred.

Just be aware that you reach a point of diminishing, or even negative, returns as the specifications get more and more detailed.

More testing should be done automatically. It's important to note that by automatically we meant that the test /results/ are interpreted automatically as well.

Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution