Quotes About Progress

In one of the most often-quoted passages of On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: 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. Natural

Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and

Darwin's familiarity with human-caused extinction is also clear from On the Origin of Species. In one of the many passages in which he heaps scorn on the catastrophists, he observes that animals inevitably become rare before they become extinct: "we know this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man's agency.

The modern humans "replaced" the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them to extinction.

The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.")

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.

more work is accomplished in one day than many diligent scribes could do in a year….

A world without change," he said, "is a world without hope

Let's put aside the goal of doing it perfectly, and replace it with the trust that we can do it differently.

Ch-ch-Changes, turn and face the strain, because I am trying to do just that.

Women are at the forefront of that kind of revolution now—a paradigm shift away from a gendered value system where the male experience is at the center of reality and all other ways of being, thinking, feeling, and doing are at the periphery.

I accept now that the point of life is not to reach perfection but to befriend the fact that human beings are works in progress.

Some of us don't. Some of us add up all of the smaller changes into one big lesson, and find our way home as well. A

No plough iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,' Henry said.

We had lived in savannah for a million years. During that time the world got warm again and wetter, and some of the rain forest returned. But for us it was too late. By then we knew how to live only on the savannah. We could still climb trees, but we did not go back.

Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.

You can't wreck anything. You only make things great.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

Let the past go, Bren, or it will ruin your future.

You should never listen to experts, because in a few years everything they know to be 'true' will be disproven. It's how it's always been, and how it will always be. That's the power of discovery and curiosity.

But ends are also beginnings, you know. Every single story has a beginning at its end.

When one is striding bravely into the future one cannot watch one's footing.

Nothing inspires motivation more than success.

Things change. Stuff happens. Life goes on.