Quotes About Progress

We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.

Invention accumulates. If you combine the diesel engine, GPS, and the echo sounder, the opportunities they create are not just added to one another, they are multiplied.

We must build bridges to the future, not the past.

Life is a competition... Not with others, but with ourselves. We should seek each day to live stronger, better, truer lives. Each to master some weakness of yesterday. Each day to repair a mistake; Each day to surpass ourselves.

Many people] plunge into all sorts of detail about what they want to accomplish, what investment they should buy, and where they want to be, without fist making sure they know where they stand now.

In all, working women currently earn more than $1 trillion a year and account for upwards of 52 percent of all earned household income in this country. There are currently over 9 million female-owned businesses in America, generating more than $3.6 trillion in annual revenues.

Remember, inspiration unused is merely entertainment. To get new results, you need to take new actions.

I love learning new techniques.

London changes because of money. It's real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it's money that changes everything in a city.

Today might not be so good. But tomorrow, you got another chance to get it right.

It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between.

Although the history of black Americans begins in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves in America, the political history of black Americans actually begins much later, in 1787 – the year in which the American political system was constructed – the year in which the Constitution was written.

The Democrats' website is accurate when it says that the Democratic efforts for civil rights "began" with Truman in 1946, for there certainly is much about civil rights that they would rather not talk about before that time.

To require perfection is to invite paralysis.

At any point along that path, your job as an artist is to push craft to its limits — without being trapped by it. The trap is perfection: unless your work continually generates new and unresolved issues, there's no reason for your next work to be any different from the last.

The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.

The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

It is the future that we are more likely to think of immediately when the idea of progress is brought up," says Robert Nisbet, "but it was only when men became conscious of a long past . . . that a consciousness of progressive movement from past to present became possible" (History of the Idea of Progress, New York, 1980, p. 323).

Much of our time is spent just maintaining our emotional lives and physical conditions. To move ahead, we often have to clear a trail as we go. Progress and development do not occur without change in our motivations and actions.

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

In 1931 there were three crimes a year for every police officer. In 2001 there were 44.

Old age comes on apace to ravage all the clime.

If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.