Quotes About Progress

If people had to spend all of every day getting enough food to eat like animals, they wouldn't have time to make aeroplanes or bombs.

Quanto impariamo dagli errori? Dipende da quanto siamo disposti ad imparare.

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.

is a gift to be able to make mistakes, find solutions, and move forward in life—a gift not to be wasted.

Taryn sighed. 'You know, there were always people who found cause for complaint about falling birth rates whenever women in developing nations got educations and the means of supporting themselves.

I want today to give up being so smugly sure about what tomorrow won't need.

The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere.

The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.

One biographer summed up Lyell's influence on Darwin as follows: "Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin." Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, "I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.

If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.

According to Lamarck, there was a force—the 'power of life'—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.

if other institutions try to use it, they

Eubaculites carinatus indicated that the group had exhausted its practical possibilities and entered some sort of decadent, Lady Gaga-ish phase.)

an amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually.

at the time of my visit he still had failed to

all that we consider to be the great works of man - the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories - will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. —JORGE LUIS BORGES

not busy being born is busy dying.