Quotes About Progress

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

They walked still farther and the girl said, Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them? No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it. Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.

passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

I know, i know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the times I was fort my blunt instrument has been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hid your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by.

We can't be good unless we know what bad is, and it's a shame we're working against time.

I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines.

We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.

My feet, said Montag. I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't move! Listen. Easy now, said the old man gently. I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.