Quotes About Progress

Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.

If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.

So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.

China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn't have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers - the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.

This, I fundamentally believe, is why scientists and engineers will do more than politicians and activists to solve today's environmental problems. They have more than words. They have solutions.

The idea I am trying to launch here is: the appearance of new species naturally and the appearance of new inventions by artifice are both responses to need.

but such is the inertia of industrial civilization that we are likely to go on using fossil fuel for a decade at least.

No man will be kept in hell loner than is necessary to bring him to a fitness for something better. When he reaches that stage the prison doors will open and there will be rejoicing among the hosts who welcome him into a better state.

The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.

He used to pimp and pull shakedowns. Now he rode shotgun to History.

The clash of Watson's and Hollerith's personalities was a classical example of a brash, energetic, visionary newcomer confronting a staid traditionalist.

IBM had its origins in Jacquard's endeavours in Revolutionary France. And indeed IBM is, indeed, a direct descendant of the work that went on in Jacquard's workshop during the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth.

Peel finally decided to interrupt the endless stream of complaints and grievances and call Babbage to order with a hard fact: 'Mr Babbage, by your own admission you have rendered the Difference Engine useless by inventing a better machine.' Babbage took the bait and glared at Peel. 'But if I finish the Difference Engine it will do even more than I promised. It is true that it has been superseded by better machinery, but it is very far from being "useless.

Computer engineers of today are likely to find that if they have a two-week holiday they may miss a crucial new development in computing. Similarly, those wishing to keep abreast of mechanical engineering in the late nineteenth century had little choice but to keep working at the coalface where knowledge was being sledge-hammered out of the rock of ignorance.

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

The American axe! It has made more real and lasting conquests than the sword of any warlike people that ever lived; but they have been conquests that have left civilization in their train instead of havoc and destruction…. A brief quarter of a century has seen these wonderful changes wrought; and at the bottom of them all lies this beautiful, well-prized, ready, and efficient implement, the American axe!

It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.

I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.