Quotes About Progress

Before Starrett Bros. & Eken could start work on what would be the world's tallest building, they had to tear down what had been the city's largest hotel, and everyone agreed it would be no easy task.

With his partner gone, Hastings lost his momentum. In 1920, he retired as an active member of the firm.1 The beneficiaries were Shreve and Lamb.

As the building climbed, cafeterias were built to keep up with the height, until there were finally five floors with cafeterias—the third, ninth, twenty-fourth, forty-seventh, and sixty-fourth.

The building, scheduled to open May 1, 1931, could have opened in April. To commemorate the completion of the building, about sixty subcontractors tendered a dinner on April 16 "to celebrate the completion of an enduring monument, a towering milestone on the road of human progress.

As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.

The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn't make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new.

Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception.

People can change, but systems cannot without losing their structural integrity.

The earth might move, but human nature only accepts the move when it suits human purposes.

All training except the most basic either secures or disestablishes things as they are.

The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.

This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It's the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.

Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen

A new clinic was opening every three days, on average,

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

Time continued to move forward, each new moment falling into the future like a line of dominoes.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. —Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message

I have barred myself from thinking I'm improving because thus far I have only been fooling myself. Nevertheless, I think I'm improving.

We will be going on, won't we?" "I suppose so. Somehow it seems like the right thing to do.

She took a step forward, then another. Gaby kept pace, and they walked into the darkness.

From those to whom privilege and opportunity are given, we have the right to expect much.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.