Quotes About Progress

The outcome is the same as the beginning only because the beginning is an end.

It is this final goal - freedom - toward which all the world's history has been working. It is this goal to which all the sacrifices have been brought upon the broad altar of the earth in the long flow of time.

Universal liberty can't produce any work or any positive action, only negative action. Universal liberty is only the rush to erase.

I give up the point for the present, reserving still a right to detract my opinion in case I shall hereafter discover any false step in my progress to it.

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things.

Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

if there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do

You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names?

An epoch is but a swing of the pendullum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.

La science est une nouvelle religion et la désinfection est son eau bénite.

But the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer's draught horse and the racehorse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature to his intention, and ennobling or debasing life for a set purpose. And what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.