Quotes About Progress

If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through text messages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine, will be outlawed.)

solo podemos crecer y progresar en este mundo si admitimos que no somos perfectos y podemos vivir con esta verdad

The Murderer

but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. 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.

whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

Mistakes can be profited by.

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 in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.

e-books smell like burned fuel

I've heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!

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

I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people, people, people. I want them to remain human.

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 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.

The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.

Before the bus had run another fifty yards on the highway, its destination would be meaningless, and its point of departure changed from metropolis to junkyard.

We know the damn silly thing we just did. 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 in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.

I am not one thing. I am many things that America has been in my time. I had enough sense to keep moving, learning, growing. And I have never reviled or turned my back on the things I grew out of.

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually 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?

Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadow are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit in his own shoes, his own best suit, for a few brief minutes. But we're in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around in a machine. That makes the machine more than a machine, doesn't it?

By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me.

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.

Quizá los libros puedan sacarnos de nuestra ignorancia. Tal vez podrían impedir que cometiéramos los mismos funestos errores.

It's the rich who have dreams and rockets!

We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like after you take your hands away.