Quotes About Progress

After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on

People forget if they don't keep testing things.

Over the years, they had tuned the walk, prying up an A board and nailing it here, lifting up an F board and pounding it back down there until the walk was as near onto being melodious as weather and two entrepreneurs could fashion it.

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 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.[...]

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

when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

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.

The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its own. Then - motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.' 'And because they had mass, they became simpler

You can't hold onto the past. No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.

Is the programming on such an ear-button receiver of a caliber to enable a man to be a gyroscope, both taking from and giving to society, beautifully balanced?

But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had ever run this way. He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried.

before the last boundaries were fixed—when there were no highways, only horse paths, and train tracks, and the Gold Rush was on in Nevada.

And if we start using Celsius in the next few years, I will be severely disappointed.

for it is this modern Occidental civilization which, since about the middle of the thirteenth century, has been—quite literally—the only innovating civilization in the world.

The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.

they had never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should think the cause of progress got them, anyhow. However, through this glorious affair I got my appointment, before I had fairly begun to hope for it. I flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of

Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.

Time had past indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulderstraps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those unaccounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental success.

smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes.

Is any man so foolish as to fear change, to which all things that once were not owe their being?

Well! well! It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.