Quotes About Progress

Knowledge is power—all Scottish philosophers recognized this— and the route to knowledge is through experience. But Reid insisted that that power belonged to every man, regardless of any other attributes. Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible, so that we can all become truly, morally free.

This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world," George James says in Stolen Legacy, which "laid the foundations of modern progress." Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, "How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?

We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men's Understanding.

In every society," Kames concluded, "the advances of government toward perfection are strictly proportioned to the advance of society" toward mutual cooperation and improvement. The better we all get along, in other words, the more benign our rulers can afford to be.

Total economic production in the United States had doubled;* wages rose by 70 percent.

ornery enough that they will not stay where the rule was laid down. In that I believe you will find the greatest hope for America's future. —William S. Knudsen

With Saint Augustine, we come to the end of the road as far as the Greco-Roman world is concerned.

the commercial stage represents the greatest change from the past.

Far more than Thomas Aquinas or even Bacon, Ockham is the true forerunner of the modern era.

This posed a dilemma, which Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. "Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity," he said.

with commerce and industry had come literacy for Europe's new urban middle class.

More than any previous work, Galileo's Dialogue showed that if Copernicus wasn't right on every detail of the working of the solar system, Aristotle and Ptolemy were both very clearly wrong. The first printing sold out almost at once.

All the great peoples of democracy . . . have taken that place in the battle that was destined for them. They work for the triumph not of one alone, but of all."10

the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error.

A new concept had entered the modern consciousness. The idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people, but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before.

Fundamental to the Scottish notion of history is the idea of progress. The Scots argued that societies, like individuals, grow and improve over time. They acquire new skills, new attitudes, and a new understanding of what individuals can do and what they should be free to do. The Scots would teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before. The present judges the past, not the other way around.

Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. "Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity," he said. "If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear.

If we want to know what a man really is, we need to focus not on where he came from or what he left behind, but on what he can do now and in the future, as part of his own dynamic nature. What applies to individual dogs and men can be extended to human beings in general. For Aristotle's disciples in the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, it even applies to entire societies. In the Aristotelian mind-set, it is the future that counts, not the past.

for Aristotle the world we make for ourselves continually reflects that constant striving toward improvement. In that sense, Aristotle is the first great advocate of progress—and Plato, creator of the vanished utopia Atlantis, the first great theorist of the idea of decline.21

While Egypt gave the world its astronomy and science, China its art, and Mesopotamia its religion, the sole contribution of Nordic civilization was the factory. "As a system of culture," Du Bois announced, white civilization "runs chiefly to marvelous contrivances for enslaving the many, and enriching the few, and murdering both."42

self-conscious principle: change as reform, rather than revolution.

In 1803, the liberal political economist Francis Jeffrey identified the middle class or "middling ranks" as the social stratum in which this progress took place. The reasonable, sober, polite, and industrious manners of the middle classes (in French, la bourgeoisie ), Jeffrey argued, form the cutting edge of civilization's moral, economic, and social improvement, which trickles down to the other ranks of society.

If co-operation, is thus the lifeblood of science and technology, it is similarly vital to society as a whole.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright!