Quotes About Progress

For decades, ENIAC, not Colossus, was considered the mother of all computers.

The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.

The three Britons had to sit back and watch as their discoveries were rediscovered by Diffie, Hellman, Merkle, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman over the next three years.

necessity is the mother of invention, then

In my mind, the most noble way to leave your mark on the world is to expand man's understanding of the world.

We must be content to grow slowly. Most of us will still barely be at the beginning of our recovery by the time we die. But that is better than killing ourselves pretending to be healthy.

Ik schrijf zo snel omdat ik benieuwd ben naar de afloop.

And I reflect that people like him are still being born, people who can be indoctrinated with evil. Mankind is ostensibly striving to avert catastrophes; medical progress gives us hope that one day disease can be conquered, but will we ever be able to prevent the creation of mass murderers?

From a book talk in Palo Alto for The Perfectionists; He pulled out his new iphone and told us that its Apple-designed chipset has 8 billion[!] transistors, and that someone at Intel told him that there are now more transistors in electronics than all the leaves on all the world's trees. Something like 15 quintillion of them!

There are now more transistors at work on this planet (some 15 quintillion, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000) than there are leaves on all the trees in the world. In 2015, the four major chip-making firms were making 14 trillion transistors every single second.

Perfection is the child of time.—BISHOP JOSEPH HALL, WORKS

our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?

the hallmark of the Enlightenment was off to the races.

To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forwards - and at breathtaking chronological speed - in a self-propelled time-machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geological time: a million years of history goes by with every couple of miles march.

They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today's middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries... a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow knew was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present.

Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over--this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success.

C'est par le travail que la femme a conquis sa dignité d'être humain; mais ce fut une conquête singulièrement dure et lente.

To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.

Constituye una paradoja criminal rehusar a la mujer toda actividad pública, cerrarle las carreras masculinas, proclamar en todos los dominios su incapacidad y confiarle, al mismo tiempo, la empresa más delicada y más grave de cuantas existen...la formación de un ser humano.

Ver cambiar el mundo es a la vez milagroso y desolador

L'action des femmes n'a jamais été qu'une agitation symbolique; elles n'ont gagné que ce que les hommes ont bien voulu leur concéder; elles n'ont rien pris: elles ont reçu.