Quotes About Progress

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.

What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.

A journey is an achievement, Maria, just as much as a mathematical proof.

They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.

New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.

An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come.

The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That's what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.

The world is changing and you're only just becoming accustomed to it. You're changing, I suppose. You've changed since I've known you.' 'How?' 'You've come more alive.

No one's book is perfect.

I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from.

it was] perceived that it was easier to rise upwards east of the Urals. A man who left Russia as a common soldier became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and a colonel in Kamchatka.

Both moderns and postmoderns must be willing to try old things in new ways and new things in old ways.

You've got to make a conscious choice every day to shed the old - whatever 'the old' means for you.

Plans fall apart and time moves on.

Things never stay the same. That's just the way life is. I doesn't mean it's all bad. Change can be good. Even exciting!

I can't recall consciously deciding to trick time, but that is what has happened. Somehow Martin and I, instead of being leashed for all eternity to what happened sixteen years ago, instead of that being the huge Before and After defining my life, have been set free.

Just because humans have become -advanced- enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evolutionary processes have ceased to operate.

Just because humans have become "advanced" enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evoutionary processes have ceased to operate.

After all, "the" human species is no more static than other species are. If our environment changes (or, more pertinent in the human case, as we transform our environment), we change with it.

I don't think it's time yet to eliminate cash, but I propose having a less-cash society, not a cashless one.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

You see, if you are 30 years ahead of your time, you will always have difficulty speaking with the bosses in the industry. They are too conservative.

Since the well-known victory over the hare by the tortoise, the descendants of the tortoise think themselves miracles of speed.