Quotes About Progress

If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps. [Criticizing Richard Dawkins]

A] new idea will, like mother earth, take some serious hits. If good it will survive, probably in modified form. If bad it will die, usually at the time of death or retirement of the last original proponent. As Paul Samuelson once said of the science of economics: funeral by funeral, theory advances.

The idea and its supporting logic came in pieces

The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.

A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.

The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

Evolution is not stupid, and works much faster than most people realize.

Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.

Innovations are always necessarily gradual and incremental, building on the accumulated insights of past humans. We are the cultural animal par excellence, and our ability to share the products of our individual creativity and pass them on to future generations is the key to our ecological dominance.30

Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.

We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.

Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day.

Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants.

Sanctification is like a clumsy, slow walk rather than a light switch that we turn from off to on.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

Engineers are, by definition, people whose work is dedicated to making people's lives easier; or, as people used to say, whose work is dedicated to progress.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

One of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight.