Quotes About Progress

For those who still believe our age's disruptions match what happened after 1870, ask yourself which you would first give up, your iPhone or the flush toilet? Laptop or antibiotics? If you have trouble answering those, ponder life without electricity. It is a measure of our solipsism that we take for granted what went before.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history. FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell, the great American sociologist, said, 'economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies'.

The West's median income, meanwhile, has barely shifted in the last half-century.

life is a process not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Mastery means making progress at a task that matters to you and is challenging.

Melanie and Douglas are now both doing well.

Deberiamos respetar a los muertos y honrar lo diferentes que eran de nosotros en lugar de hacerlo para celebrar su capacidad de precedernos o la nuestra para superarlos

Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It's not so much about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself and the experiences along the way

This plan, of betting only at a level at which I was emotionally comfortable and not advancing until I was ready, enabled me to play my system with a calm and disciplined accuracy. This lesson from the blackjack tables would prove invaluable throughout my investment lifetime as the stakes grew ever larger. Eddie

With time, lucky managers tend to fade.

the philosopher George Santayana famously warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Though the institutions of society have difficulty learning from history, individuals can do so.

Human beings and their social orders are intrinsically imperfectible and fortunately so. In a constantly changing world, we need the flexibility that only imperfection provides.

to get hold of the human condition, we need next a much broader definition of history than is conventionally used.

The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

let's also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

Like the sunlight and the firelight that guided our birth, we need a unified humanities and science to construct a full and honest picture of what we truly are and what we can become.

Perhaps the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized - made part of the new synthesis.

no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them.

eusociality, the most advanced state of social behavior

What drove the hominins on through to larger brains, higher intelligence, and thence language-based culture? That, of course, is the question of questions.

But history shows that logic launched from introspection alone lacks thrust, can travel only so far, and usually heads in the wrong direction.